Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

CHAPTER 20

“Bend over,” the marshal said.

The state cop who’d driven me in smiled awkwardly. The head cop behind the desk shot an embarrassed grin at the Treasury agent standing beside him. Somebody’s got to do it.

Humiliation is the tool of choice in basic training. Once, when I didn’t move fast enough in the run-fall-in-the-dirt-crawl-and-kill-the-enemy lessons, a sergeant made me grab my crotch.

“What do you feel there, Private?” the sergeant yelled.

“Balls, sir!”

“I don’t believe it! You have balls, Private?”

“Yessir,” I yelled.

“You aren’t a pussy?”

“No, sir!”

“Let me hear it, then!”

“I am not a pussy, sir!”

“What?”

“I am not a pussy, sir!”

I wasn’t humiliated that men made me drop my pants (Army training is good for something). I was humiliated that I’d gotten caught. There was nothing these guys could do to make me feel worse.

I dropped my pants on the floor, pulled down my underwear, and bent over. “Spread your cheeks,” said the marshal. I reached back and pulled my buttocks apart. I looked at the man behind the desk, the man in charge. He looked down at his desktop. The room was silent as the marshal checked me out. I think this was a kind of staring match: the marshal stared at me, and I, I presume, stared back. I think I was supposed to break down with embarrassment and tell them what they wanted to know. Moments later, the marshal said “He’s clean” to the man behind the desk.

I stood up and faced the cop behind the desk.

“You can pull your pants back on, Mr. Mason,” he said. He pulled a cord, opened the Venetian blinds behind him as I pulled up my pants. The ten o’clock sun was blazing down on a parking lot. We were in a government building near the federal court building in Charleston. A woman, dressed in the kind of professional clothes for women designed to mimic men’s suits, was leaning into her car to put her briefcase down. I zipped my fly.

“Have a seat,” the man said, nodding toward a chair in front of his desk.

I nodded and sat down. The guy looked at papers on his desk. He and the rest of the cops were dressed in business suits. I was wearing salt-stained, stiff, smelly jeans, two crusty shirts, and a pair of damp running shoes. I hadn’t washed for days. The freezing weather had made bathing impossible. I needed a shave.

“Says here you refused to cooperate with the arresting officers,” the head cop behind the desk said, looking up from the papers.

“I didn’t refuse,” I said. “I told them I wanted to cooperate. I still do. I just think I’d be smart to have an attorney with me when I do.”

“Bullshit!” said the Treasury agent, standing up to hover over me. “You don’t want to help us. You’re protecting your friends. You’re a lowlife drug smuggler; and now, when we give you a chance to prove you have a conscience, you continue breaking the law by protecting other criminals.”

“All I know is that the three of us were definitely on the Namaste. I have no idea where anybody else was. That’s the truth.” And it was, technically. I did know where the shore team was supposed to be, but that’s all I knew. Where were they actually? I hadn’t a clue.

“Okay,” said the head cop. “Let’s say that’s true. Tell us who was in the shore team.”

“I don’t know. I was just a crew member. Nobody told me anything.”

The Treasury guy nodded. He looked frustrated. I presumed he’d heard this before; they’d already interviewed John and Ireland. “How did you get the money to the Colombians?”

“I don’t—”

“Give us a break, Mason!” the Treasury agent yelled. “You know plenty. You know enough to help us. Do you realize how much money is being sent to these countries by guys like you? Do you?”

I shook my head.

“Millions of dollars every day. It’s a disaster. U.S. currency is being drained from circulation and poured into the pockets of organized crime.”

I felt the urge to tell him that if we didn’t have such ridiculous drug laws, this weed we now pay millions for would be effectively worthless and nobody’d be smuggling it; or if they let American farmers grow it, we could tax it and keep the profits here. The law and drug smugglers have one thing in common: neither wants marijuana legalized. But this wasn’t an after-dinner political debate. This was a routine post arrest interrogation. These guys had probably tried pot themselves; they probably thought the laws were stupid, too. They were just doing their jobs. “That’s a shame,” I said.

The Treasury guy glared at me and turned to the head cop and shrugged. The head cop looked at me and then at the marshal and the state cop, the same guy who’d brought me here. Everybody was shrugging, saying, Well, we tried. It isn’t like the old days, you know, when they could beat the shit out of you and you would talk. Now they can only try to scare you. Anything you say without an attorney is a gift for the law. The head cop looked at me and said, “Mr. Mason, you’re going on trial soon. Now, unless you change your attitude, I will report in your arrest record that you were totally uncooperative. You will be charged with smuggling marijuana, possession of marijuana, and possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute marijuana. Three major felonies. You’re looking at forty years, and that’s just the federal charges. The state wants you, too, for all the same charges.” The cop stared at me for a second. “You sure you want your record to show that you are unrepentant, uncooperative?”

“You can do what you want. It’s your record. I’m not talking about this without an attorney. I can’t believe you don’t understand that. I’ve never been in this much trouble in my whole life. I’m amazed you think I should just spill my guts without legal counsel. You’d demand to have an attorney present if you were sitting here.”

The cop nodded slightly and said, “You can go.” He looked at the cop who’d brought me in. “Okay, Fred. Take him to the holding tank.”

Fred nodded and I walked to the door. He opened it and I walked out into a hallway. Fred pointed ahead and we walked.

“Man, you really stink of marijuana,” Fred said.

“Wow,” I said. “I wonder how that happened.”

Fred laughed. Just a regular guy.

Fred drove me a couple of blocks to the federal court building. We walked in the front door, Fred dressed for work, me dressed like a street bum who’d been sleeping in these reeking clothes for two weeks. We walked by some people getting their mail at the first-floor post office and climbed the stairs to the third floor. Fred escorted me down the hall to a cage set off the hallway like a coffee-break room except with bars on the door. John and Ireland sat on benches inside the cage.

They looked terrible. No wonder people think criminals are a dirty bunch. If I hadn’t known them, they would’ve made me nervous.

A deputy came up to us and Fred told him to let me in.

As soon as the door closed, John asked Fred, “Do you smoke?”

“Naw,” Fred said.

“Damn. I got to have a cigarette, man.” John jerked his head toward me. “Bob, too.”

I nodded.

Fred shrugged. “Okay, give me some money and I’ll buy you some.”

John jammed his hand into his pocket and immediately laughed. “Nice joke—ah, what is your name, anyway?”

“Fred.”

“Funny, Fred. You guys took all our money.”

Fred smiled. “Okay, I’ll lend you a couple of bucks. I mean, I can see you’re a trustworthy bunch.” He turned and walked away.

John and I chain-smoked a pack of Salems, the brand Fred figured everybody smoked. Ireland sat slumped on a bench, trying to nap. He’d been complaining about his stomach.

I sat next to Ireland, tired but not even a little sleepy, watching John pace back and forth in the eight-by-eight-foot cell.

“So what did you tell them?” John asked.

“I told them Bob and I were crew members on the boat, you were the captain.”

“That’s it? I mean, you tell them where we came from, anything like that?”

“Nope. Nothing else.”

He turned to Ireland. “You didn’t say anything, right?”

Ireland grimaced and clutched his stomach with both hands. “No, man.”

“Good,” John said.

“Yeah. Great, John,” I said. “We have them exactly where we want them, eh? I mean, the only evidence they have on us is a fucking boatload of marijuana.”

“It could be worse,” John said, without much conviction.

“Shouldn’t we be getting a lawyer?” I said.

“The team’s probably figured it out by now,” John said. “We’ll be contacted.”

I nodded. Right, the team. The same idiots who spent six weeks watching that canal, except for the night we came in. That team.

I was too tired to argue anymore. The whole thing was a dream. I sat back against the wall and smoked a Salem. There was nothing to do but wait and watch the process we’d triggered when we bumped into the Customs boat. A whole crew of people trained in the disposition of captured criminals were now hard at work, and they did this every day. It was something to watch, a distraction from the despair I felt.

An hour later, two deputies came to the door and said we had a hearing with the magistrate. We left the cell and followed one deputy down the hall, trailed by another.

A sign on the door said Robert Carr, U. S. Magistrate. We went inside. DEA Agent Cook, who’d been at the scene of the arrest, was sitting against the wall near the magistrate’s desk. The magistrate offered us the three chairs in front of the desk. A stenographer, a woman, nodded curtly to us when the magistrate indicated she would be taking notes of the meeting. We sat.

“Gentlemen, a federal grand jury has just indicted you. The crimes you are charged with are possession of a controlled substance, marijuana; possession of a controlled substance, marijuana, with the intention to distribute a controlled substance; and the illegal importation of a controlled substance, marijuana.” The magistrate looked at us. “Each one of you is charged with the commission of all three of these crimes.”

I nodded dumbly, noticing that John and Ireland did the same. I wanted to ask how one crime could become three. And how if you multiply three crimes times three people, you now have nine crimes; and is that actually true? I mean—

“I’ll be setting bond for you men,” said the magistrate. “And I need some information to help me decide how much they’ll be.” He picked up a scratch pad and a pencil and asked John, “Your name?”

“John Tillerman.”

“Address?”

“P.O. box—”

“You have a street address?”

“One mile off state road 343, three miles south of High Springs, Florida.”

“Country place?” the magistrate said, his brow raised.

“Yeah, I like the country,” John said.

The magistrate nodded and asked, “What kind of work do you do, Mr. Tillerman?”

“I’m a carpenter,” John said.

“I see,” the magistrate said, making a note. “And who do you work for?”

“I’m self-employed.”

“Okay. And your approximate annual income from this line of work?”

And so on. The magistrate was taking what amounted to a credit application. He asked John all the usual questions: marriage status (married); education (college degree), references, and so on. I began to nod off from fatigue and boredom. Then I heard the magistrate ask, “And your name, sir?” I looked up to see that he was talking to me.

“Bob Mason,” I said.

“Robert Mason?”

“Yes. Robert Caverly Mason.”

“Caverly? That’s unusual.”

“It’s English.”

“Hmm.” The magistrate nodded. He then asked me the same set of questions. When he asked me what my profession was, I said, “I’m a writer.” It just popped out of my mouth.

“Really?” the magistrate said. “What sort of writing do you do?”

“I’m writing a book about being a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.”

“Really? Who’s the publisher?”

“Well, I don’t have a publisher yet. It, the manuscript, is in New York now. My agent’s trying to sell it.”

“Oh,” the magistrate said, clearly disappointed. Nearly everyone is interested in writers, but not so much interested in writers who are not published. Almost everybody knows an unpublished writer. In New York, where publishers collect tons of unsolicited manuscripts, they will tell you that it seems like almost everyone in America is an unpublished writer trying to get published. I kept asking myself angrily why I’d said I was a writer. I guess I was trying to impress someone at the lowest moment of my life: Hey, I have a manuscript; I have an agent; I’ve been to New York City.

“So, Mr. Mason, while you are waiting to sell a book, what do you do for a living?”

“My wife and I run rural paper routes for the Gainesville Sun.”

“And about how much do you make doing that?”

I couldn’t tell him the truth. It was just too dismal. Sure, I was dead meat on a hook, I was a captured crook, but I had my pride. I was not going to admit to this guy—who made sixty-five thousand a year—that Patience and I would, if I were working, bring in about twelve thousand a year. “Twenty thousand,” I said.

The magistrate cocked his head. Too much to believe. “Twenty thousand between the two of us,” I added.

“Oh,” said the magistrate, and marked it down on his pad. He asked me the rest of the questions and then did the same for Ireland.

When he’d gotten the personal information, he began asking DEA Agent Cook, as one of the arresting officers, questions about our crime. “Were there weapons involved in this crime, Agent Cook?”

“No, sir,” Agent Cook said. “We found a Winchester forty-four magnum, lever-action rifle on their boat. It was unloaded and stored in a case. We presume it was used as a shark gun.” That was true, and it was also incredibly fair of Agent Cook not to imply that the gun was part of our crime, considering it would’ve been easy to do so and would’ve added much to the seriousness of our charges. Who’d believe otherwise?

The magistrate nodded. “And approximately how much marijuana did you find on their boat?”

“Approximately three thousand pounds, sir.”

The magistrate nodded, looking over his glasses at us. It sounded like an awful lot, but it was also five hundred pounds short of what we thought we’d brought in. John and I glanced at each other.

“And what do you estimate is the value of that amount of marijuana?” the magistrate asked.

“At present street prices, we estimate that amount of marijuana is worth about two point four million dollars,” Agent Cook said.

The room was quiet for a moment. The stenographer looked up at us. When people start talking about millions of dollars, it attracts attention.

“Okay, gentlemen,” the magistrate said. “I have what I need in order to establish bonds for you. It’ll take my office a few days to check your backgrounds. I’m sure you understand?” He waited until we had all three nodded that was obviously the case. “Good. Then I will have a deputy take you to the Charleston County Jail, where you will be held until I’ve made my decision. Thank you for your cooperation.”

We waited in the holding tank down the hall while the federal deputies got the transportation details arranged. We asked for food, but they said we’d get lunch at the jail. A secretary from an office a couple of doors away brought us three cups of coffee on a plastic tray.

“You the pot smugglers?” she asked as she handed us the Styrofoam cups through the bars.

“Yeah,” John said. “That’s us.”

She let the tray drop beside her skirt, smiled, and shook her head. “Business isn’t so good today?”

“Not so good,” John said.

She watched until we sipped from the cups she’d brought and then smiled and went back to her office, a room like ours except it had no graffiti on the walls and no bars on the door.

An hour later, two deputies, one white and one black, let us out of the cell and escorted us to the elevator. They took us to the basement, where they fitted us with chains. They put fat leather belts on our waists which had metal rings on them through which they threaded long chains so we were chained together. If we made a break for it, we would look like three handcuffed mountain climbers in a rush.

“What’s this?” John said. “We’ve been walking around this place all day with no cuffs, no nothing. Why you chaining us now?”

“Regulations,” the black deputy said. “I got no choice.”

The white deputy opened the door and we walked out, trailing each other. They guided us to a big Ford and let us in the backseat.

It was about two in the afternoon as the Ford drove up a ramp onto an expressway. The sun was bright, the air chilled. We drove along the expressway. The sun hit my face, feeling pleasant. The people in the passing cars seemed so different now. They, any of them, could, on a whim, just turn off at the next exit, go anywhere they wanted to go. They were free.

The black deputy apparently got a lot of complaints about the chains. “I had to transport this guy once, a farmer,” the deputy said. “He was in jail for making his own liquor. Judge let him out of jail temporarily to go harvest his tobacco crop, you know?”

“They let people out of jail to do that?” Ireland said.

“Yeah, they can. This judge did. Anyway, this old boy had been home for over a month, the harvest was over, and the judge said I should go fetch him back to jail. So we, Billy, here,” he said, nodding to the white deputy next to him, “Billy and me, we go out to the sticks to this guy’s house. Damned if he wasn’t waiting for us, all cleaned up and ready to go; been out there for a month, could’ve just took off. His wife is saying good-bye; his kids are crying. Then I tell him I have to put on the cuffs. Damned if he didn’t get crazy! He says, ‘What? I been out here by myself, trustworthy as you fucking please, and you want to put me in chains?’ And I say, ‘C’mon, now. This is just regulations. If it was up to me, I wouldn’t do it, you know?’ Well, the guy just didn’t understand it, the regulations, you know. Took it personal. He proceeded to get real loud and nasty and me and Billy had to draw our guns. By then he had worked himself into such a state that made him even madder. He got started looking like he was going to hit us, and we ended up having to shoot the guy.”

“You shot him?” John said.

“Had to. He woulda taken off. Didn’t kill him or nothing. Just wounded him, you know?” The deputy nodded to himself behind the wheel. “Just the same, it was nasty business. I didn’t feel good about hurting that dumb redneck. Plus, he got more time for attempted escape. Nasty business. I’m looking forward to retiring this coming year.”

Nobody said anything for a while. I watched a family packed in a station wagon pass us. A boy in the back stared at me curiously. I looked away, at the back of the deputy’s head. “Where you going? When you retire?” I said.

“Miami. Have a kid down there. Owns a bar. Thought I’d join him in my afternoon years,” the deputy said. “Ever been to Miami?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Nice, ain’t it?”

“It’s the pits. I’d give anything to be there right now.”

The two deputies laughed while we drove onto an off ramp to a highway. We were twenty minutes from Charleston, in the country. In the distance we could see a complex of low beige buildings surrounded by chain-link fences topped with coils of barbed wire. “That’s the Charleston County Jail, boys,” the deputy said.

Twelve hours after we’d been caught in Five-Fathom Creek, we were standing in the receiving area of the Charleston County Jail. We were tired and utterly defeated. John was not cracking jokes. Ireland looked terrible, kept complaining that his stomach was getting worse. I just watched, dazed, as they unlocked the chains, pulled them through the rings on our belts. They unfastened our belts and pointed to a black guy standing in the hall. “Follow him,” the white deputy said.

We followed the black clerk into a room and gave him our watches and wallets, which he put into manila envelopes and labeled with a felt-tip pen. Then he fingerprinted us. When he finished, he told us to wait outside in the hallway.

We stood against the wall and watched the cops coming and going at the main entrance. A woman behind a tall desk talked on a radio and answered the phone. Guards walked in and nodded at us vaguely as they walked by. All this coming and going inside a county jail was kind of interesting if you’d never seen it before. It was a testimony to our fatigue that it took us fifteen minutes to realize that we could just walk out the door.

“Nobody’s watching the damn door!” John hissed.

I stared at the door and watched a guard walk out unnoticed. The woman was talking on the phone and didn’t press a buzzer to unlock the door; the door was just open. Now and then, somebody would look at us, but since we were dressed in our sailing clothes, we just looked like run-of-the-mill American deadbeats, possibly homeless, certainly not prisoners. We were invisible as far as people trained to watch people dressed as prisoners were concerned.

“We could just walk out of here,” I said.

John laughed. “I know! It’s unbelievable!”

Ireland looked at us, grimacing. He said his stomach was twisting up in knots. His suntanned skin had paled and he winced when he said, “They want us to walk out; then they shoot us.”

“Naw,” John said. “They’re not that smart. These people are just working. They don’t give a shit about us.” He walked toward the door.

I followed, wondering just how far we could get, but John veered from the door and walked up to the woman behind the tall desk. We stood about ten feet from the glass doors to freedom, staring at the woman. She looked up, smiled, and said “May I help you?” with a look of faint surprise on her face from, I believe, our general haggard appearance.

“Maybe,” John said. He looked at me and back at the woman. “We’re prisoners. Checking in.”

The woman grinned, leaned back ready for a big laugh, then snapped forward, assuming the posture of open-mouthed incredulity. “Excuse me?” she said.

“We’re prisoners,” John said. “Guy told us to wait here, but it’s been a half hour.”

The woman was nodding as John spoke, but she was distracted, looking everywhere for a guard. One came up behind us and got in line, waiting his turn.

“Johnson,” the woman blurted to the guard. “These men are prisoners.”

Johnson jerked out of a daydream stupor, which people who work in places like this develop as a survival skill, and stared at us like we’d just stepped off a spaceship.

“Prisoners?”

“Yessir,” I said. “Guy told us to wait—”

“What guy?”

I pointed to the room where we had checked our stuff.

“Goddammit,” Johnson said. He leaned close to the woman and said, “Call Willy and tell him to get his ass back to work!”

The woman nodded quickly and punched a phone button. Meanwhile, Johnson escorted us down the hall that led into the depths of the Charleston County Jail.

Everything was made of poured concrete in this jail. The floors, the walls—no bricks. They’d painted the floors gray and the walls pale green in keeping with the building’s spirit of dull utility.

Johnson stopped at a door marked clothing room and opened it. Inside the small room, floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with what can only be described as rags—blue and gray tattered pants and shirts. Johnson handed us each a net laundry bag. “Take off your civvies and put everything in the bag,” he said.

Johnson waited impatiently by the door as we stripped. Another guard stopped at the doorway. “Thought you went home.”

“Thought so, too,” Johnson said.

I wanted to ask Johnson if he meant for us to turn in our underwear, too, but he was busy. So I just stood there in my Jockeys and waited. I wasn’t in a big hurry. I saw myself in a detached way, standing nearly naked in a place where they kept men in cages. I thought I should feel something. Fear or nervousness, something. I felt numb.

“What happened?” said the guard.

“Fucking Willy had these guys standing around next to the goddamn front door.”

“We supposed to put our underwear in the bag, too?” John asked me.

“I dunno—”

“Yeah. Everything goes in the bag,” Johnson said.

“Standing by the door?” the guard said, smiling like he was going to pop.

“Yeah,” Johnson said. “That damn nig—” He paused and looked up and down the hallway. “That damn nigger is about spacey as they come,” Johnson said.

The guard laughed. He seemed to be looking at me, so I smiled back. I knew Willy was spacey, too. Willy didn’t allow me to keep my toothbrush when we checked in—I had it in my jacket pocket—but said they’d give me another one. That’s pretty spacey, isn’t it? A toothbrush is a toothbrush—isn’t it? The guard saw me smiling and glanced at Johnson and nodded at me. Johnson turned around and saw the three of us standing naked, holding three laundry bags of stinking clothes. He jerked his head to the shelves. “Grab yourselves a set of clothes. You get one shirt, one pair of pants, pair of socks.” We nodded.

“Somebody’d been up shit creek if these boys had’ve taken off,” Johnson said to the guard. “And you can just damn well bet I’d be the one without the paddle.”

“I know it,” the guard said. “Jenkins has a hair up his ass when it comes to you, Roy. What’d you ever do to that man?”

I couldn’t find any pants that weren’t tom to literal shreds, and I was getting pissed about it. This is America, isn’t it? “Look at this shit,” I said to John. “These are fucking rags.”

“They’re what you get, boy,” Johnson said, irritated. “Get that shit on and let’s get out of here.”

I pulled on the most intact pair of pants I could find and rooted around the shelves for a shirt.

“The fucker had to come down and catch me one night when I was looped at the Alibi,” Johnson said. “Ever since, he’s been giving me shit for it.”

The guard shook his head, grinning at Johnson’s wild ways.

I found a shirt which had two buttons and put it on. I was trying to find some socks. The guard checked the hallway and said, “Yeah. Jenkins can be a real ball-buster about drinking,” he said.

We were all three properly dressed prisoners now, standing there in tattered blue uniforms that had been worn by hundreds of men over the last ten years or so, standing in socks, holding our bags of civilian clothes, waiting for Johnson to tell us what to do next before we dropped from exhaustion. “You got that right. I’m thinking I’ll transfer to state—” Johnson stopped when he saw the guard looking at us. He turned around. “All right. Put your bags over on that shelf. Grab a blanket and let’s get out of here,” Johnson said, pointing to a stack of gray woolen blankets on the floor. I’d missed them; thought they were cleaning rags. We each stashed our gear on the shelf and grabbed an armload of ragged blanket and clutched it to our chests. “Do we get shoes?” John asked.

Johnson shook his head like that was the dumbest question he’d ever heard in his entire life. “Naw. We’re out. They’ll give you some when you get to your cell block.”

“Well, Roy,” said the guard, “got to get moving. I’m taking the better half out tonight. Her birthday.”

Johnson nodded. “Okay, Henry. See you tomorrow.”

We followed Roy Johnson down the hall to a big steel door where he waved to somebody through the wire-embedded glass windows. He was signaling a guard who stood in a boxlike pavilion in the middle of the hub that was the central intersection of this jail. From that pavilion, a guard could watch all six wings. The door opened. We walked into the hub. The door closed.

We followed Johnson down a hallway. Inmates began hooting at us as we walked by. We looked pretty silly, dressed in our rags, and they had a terrific time letting us know that. There is only one thing lower than a prisoner in jail, and that is a new prisoner in the same jail. I noticed that the prisoners were dressed in fairly neat clothes and even had shoes. So this junk they gave us was probably just part of some initiation process.

“Hey, assholes,” somebody yelled. “Welcome to Charleston!” Hoots of laughter.

Johnson stopped at another big metal door and pushed a buzzer. A pair of eyes peeked through a small barred window. We heard the door click, watched it open. A black guard shook his head and said “I don’t know where they expect we’re gonna put these fuckers” and made a sour expression.

“Always room for one more in the federal wing, Porter,” Johnson said, laughing. We walked in through the door as the guard. Porter, waved us inside. On the other side of the door, we waited while he slammed the big door shut, watching Johnson’s face disappear in the narrowing gap. I had the strange feeling that I missed Johnson already. We’d known him longer than anyone else here. We were newborn jailbirds, and just naturally took to the first face we saw.

Porter, our new guard, motioned for us to move down the hall. One side of the hall had windows every ten feet that looked out onto a weedy chain-link-fenced exercise yard. The other side was a wall of steel bars. Four feet behind the bars, across a sort of open-air hallway, there were more steel bars with doors every eight feet, doors to dark cages with men glowering in them. Farther down the hallway, a television sitting on a wheeled stand blared into a large barred room filled with men and gray metal tables. About thirty men, dressed in the same kind of rags we wore, were sitting or lying on the tables. The guard stopped at the TV, which was beyond arm’s reach of the prisoners, and switched the channel abruptly. Men yelled and booed behind the bars. One guy said, “Hey, Porter. There’s nothing on that fucking channel.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Porter said. “I said you watch channel four. That’s what you watch.” He pushed the television farther away from the bars. “How you changing the channel, anyway?”

“Fuck you Porter,” somebody said. Porter seemed not to notice and put a key in a lock on the door of the barred dayroom and opened it. He looked at us watching him. I think we had the sort of looks on our faces that said, You mean, go in there? Us? “C’mon,” Porter said. “Get in there. Let’s go.”

We walked inside.

Porter locked the door behind us.

We stood just inside the room, each clutching a blanket against his chest, staring at the men.

The men stared at us. They were mostly black men. With our deep suntans from forty-four days of sailing, we were still lily-whites. Lily-white motherfuckers, as one man near the shower stall at the back of the room muttered. One of them, a big black guy who sat on the table nearest us, said, “What you want? Somebody to show you your fucking room?”

“Yeah,” John said, stepping forward. “Where we supposed to sleep?”

The black guy studied John quickly, probably checking his size and the general condition of his muscles. John was in great shape, as well as big, and the guy was impressed. He smiled a little and pointed over his shoulder. “Down the hall.”

“Any particular room?” John said.

“Naw. Take your pick,” the guy said. “Life’s good in the federal wing. You can do anything you want here.” He laughed. The half dozen men sitting on the table nearest the television in the hall, which was flickering, blaring about using Tide for your laundry, laughed.

We walked out of the large dayroom and into the barred hallway. We checked out the cells, looking for a home. They were all filled with black men who just stared at us, not saying anything, not looking friendly. The third cell had three white guys in it, and we went in.

We stood there watching the men, waiting for something to happen. There were eight bunks—steel shelves hung out from the walls on chains with thin pads on them, four on each side. The space between the bunks was about four feet. At the back of the cell, between the two bottom bunks, the builders had crammed in a lidless and seatless commode. A white guy lying on the top bunk near the door reading a book said, “You got your choice of those two next to the shitter and the one over there,” pointing to the top bunk at the back. He turned a page and resumed reading.

We looked at each other and shrugged. Ireland collapsed onto a bottom bunk and hugged his blanket. I threw my blanket on the shelf across from Ireland. John threw his blanket on the top bunk. While Ireland groaned, John and I went back to the dayroom.

A dreamy-eyed, loopy young redneck told us that you just went to the bars and screamed out what you wanted when we asked him how you got to a phone or wanted medical attention.

“Who’s listening? When you yell?” I said.

“I dunno,” the loopy redneck said. “They hear you. Speaker talks back.”

John walked to the bars and yelled, “Hey. We want to make phone calls.”

Loopy came over to John and said, “They got one here.” He pointed to a phone on a table. “Local calls only, though.”

John nodded. “Thanks. I don’t know anybody around here.”

Loopy nodded and wandered off to sit with the guys watching the television through the bars.

“Hey!” John yelled into the hallway, his hands cupped to his mouth. “We want to make phone calls.”

“Who wants to make phone calls?” a metallic voice said.

“Tillerman and Mason.”

“Wait,” the voice said.

“And Bob Ireland needs to see a doctor,” John yelled.

No answer.

“Hey!” Loopy called. “This you guys?”

John and I looked over at Loopy. He was pointing to the television. You couldn’t see the picture unless you were nearly directly in front of the TV because you couldn’t see through the closely spaced bars at an angle. I walked over while John yelled, “Hey! Can you hear me? Ireland needs to see a doctor!”

I saw the Namaste on television. She was moored among a bunch of other yachts at some marina in Charleston. Men wearing blue jackets were wrestling big bales of marijuana out of her and loading them into a van. The announcer said this was one of the biggest marijuana hauls in local history, three thousand pounds worth over two million dollars. “Wow!” Loopy said. “You guys are big-time!”

The big black guy seemed to agree. “Motherfucker!” he said, grinning. “You boys are in some serious fucking trouble!” I could see the respect shining in his eyes.

The drug-bust story ended and the television cut to a picture of a skinny, eerie-looking blond guy wearing glasses thick enough to be paperweights. The picture switched, showing chalked outlines of where bodies had been, zooming in on puddles of sticky blood on the floor of some stockroom while a voice-over said that this guy had killed his boss and co-worker at the Piggly Wiggly food store somewhere in Charleston. He was the Piggly Wiggly murderer. He’d shot his boss and his friend for their paychecks. A seriously dangerous, but stupid, guy.

“Hey!” John yelled into the hallway. “Where the fuck is anybody?”

“What’s wrong with Ireland?” the voice from the speaker said.

“Something’s bad wrong with his stomach,” John yelled.

“Wait,” the voice said.

We waited, sitting on one of the tables. In a couple of minutes we heard the door down the hall open. Suddenly all the guys who were lurking in their cells swarmed into the dayroom. Everybody was chattering, looking happy. Something was up.

“Chow time,” Loopy said. Loopy had taken to hanging out around John and me, telling us what was what around here.

Two prisoners, trustees dressed in new blue uniforms, pushed a food cart up to the door. They began clanging down compartmented steel food trays on a shelf that stuck through the bars. The trays had stuff in them, sloppy, weird-looking kinds of stuff. I got one and looked at it: soupy rice sloshed around in a corner of the tray, a hot dog rolled around in the main compartment, and a dollop of turnip greens sat as an island in pale green juice next to a slice of wet white bread. When they’d delivered the trays, they began to ladle out Kool-Aid into plastic coffee cups you were supposed to have. Loopy, who was sitting across the table from me, said we could wash out one of the extra ones sitting back in the corner. I passed.

I made a sandwich of the hot dog and bread and ate. The hot dog was cold and rubbery. “This is terrible,” I said to Loopy.

“Yeah,” Loopy said, chewing eagerly while he nodded. “But they bring it regular.”

After dinner Porter took me out the big door and down the hall to a phone hung on the wall. He stood about ten feet away while I made a collect call home.

Jack answered.

“Dad?”

I swallowed. Hearing my son call me that was about as much as I could take. Tears started to well in my eyes and I got mad at myself and blinked them back. I looked up to see if Porter was watching, but he wasn’t.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s me, Jack. Mom around?” My question ended in such a high pitch, my voice cracked. I coughed.

“No, Dad, she went to the store. You want me to have her call you when she gets back? Where are you anyway?”

“I’m—” I had to compose myself again. “I’m in Charleston.”

“Charleston? You coming home?”

“Yes. I’m coming home in a few days. Listen, Jack. Tell Mom I’ll call back later, maybe an hour. She’ll be home in an hour?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “Wow. She’s sure going to be glad to know you’re back, Dad.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, okay. I’ll call back soon. See you soon, Jack.”

“Okay. Bye, Dad.”

I walked to Porter and said, “I couldn’t get who I wanted. Can I come back in an hour?”

“Sure,” Porter said. “Just let ’em know in the wing.”

“You mean that fucking screaming and yelling communications system you have?”

“Yeah. Intercom system,” Porter said indignantly.

Back at the cell, I lay on my shelf and wished I could sleep. They’d finally come for Ireland and led him off bent over double. They said they’d take him to a hospital if they had to. I wanted to sleep to escape. But I couldn’t. I’d gone beyond the point of no return, and probably I’d never be able to sleep again. I got up and found John in the dayroom. He was smoking a cigarette. “Where’d you get that?” I said.

“Loopy,” John said.

“Hey, Loopy,” I said. Loopy, who’d accepted this name without complaint, looked over at me, grinning. He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb at two guys holding a long tube they’d made from rolled-up newspapers. They’d carved a two-pronged fork out of a bar of soap and fitted that on the end of their four-foot paper pole. They were now slipping it out through the bars toward the television. “Yeah?” Loopy said.

“Can I borrow a smoke?”

Loopy bent his neck side to side, a limpy, goofy gesture that didn’t mean yes or no. It meant maybe. “I dunno, I only got a couple left, Bob.”

“I’ll be getting some money, Loopy. I’ll buy you a whole pack if you give me a cigarette.”

Loopy nodded and I walked over beside him while he fished a pack of Winstons out of his shirt pocket. The guy with the paper stick fitted the soap bar over the tuner knob and twisted it. It had taken them a couple of hours to make this thing, and it was a pretty clever rig. The channel changed and everybody cheered. They flipped through the channels until they got to Love Boat, a show they all wanted to see. As the guy started pulling the stick back inside, it was suddenly yanked out of his hands.

“Got it!” Porter yelled. He swaggered into view, holding the stick. He’d been hiding up against the wall in the hallway, out of sight. “I told you, I pick what you see around here.” Porter nodded sternly and broke the paper stick over his knee and stomped the soap bar to crumbs. He turned around and switched the channel back to channel four. I never figured out why Porter cared what channel we watched or why he preferred channel four. Life is filled with mysteries like Porter.

I followed Porter along the bars as he walked down the hallway to the door. “Porter,” I said. “I’d like to make that call now.”

“You got to ask the man,” Porter said.

“The man?”

“Yeah, you got to ask them,” he said, waving at the hallway in general.

“You mean I have to yell at some people I can’t see when I can just ask you?”

“Yeah. That’s the rules.”

I stood there, hanging on to the bars, watching Porter walk through the door. This guy was serious. I yelled, “Hey! Hey, somebody. Mason wants to make a phone call!”

No answer. They never answered until you yelled for a long while. If they answered right away, then everybody’d be asking them for God knows what. I yelled two more times, louder each time.

“You just made a phone call.”

“I didn’t get who I wanted to get,” I shouted.

“That’s not my fault,” said the voice.

“Look,” I said. “Nobody in my family even knows I’m in jail. When I called before, it was my son. I want to talk to my wife.”

“What?”

I could see this nitwit, sitting in some room somewhere with a microphone in front of him, bored out of his skull, snickering at what was probably the most interesting thing that would happen to him tonight, maybe this whole week.

“Look,” I shouted, “I’m allowed to make a phone call, and I want to make it now. It’s my right.”

No answer. I was about ready to yell again when the voice said, “Okay. Wait.” I guess he got tired of the game.

I went back to the table and sat next to John. “This is fucked, John. When do we see a damn lawyer?”

“The team’s on it, Bob,” John said. “I’m sure of it. They won’t let us down.”

Right. The team. How could I have forgotten? I turned to Loopy. “Loopy. Give me a cigarette.”

Loopy shook his head. “You guys got no money,” Loopy said. “And I’ve got almost no cigarettes left.”

I stared at Loopy. “We’re going to get money, Loopy. Tonight. Didn’t you see our boat on TV? Two million dollars’ worth of pot? We’re big-time smugglers. We’re fucking rich, Loopy. Give me a fucking cigarette.”

Loopy did his side-to-side, twisting, nodding thing with his head that made you wonder if he had normal connections between his shoulders and his skull and said “I guess” and handed me his pack.

I lit up a cigarette and watched the stick-maker rolling up more newspaper. His buddy was carving another bar of soap with a plastic knife.

We heard the door open and I got up figuring it was Porter coming to take me to the phone, but it was Porter bringing in a new prisoner. Porter opened the door and this scrawny short blond guy with thick glasses stepped in and stared at us. Everybody was quiet because they all recognized him. This was the Piggly Wiggly murderer, for chrissakes. The guy shifted his eyes back and forth, magnified behind thick optics, giving him a nervous, owly look. He frowned and marched directly to a table at the back of the dayroom. Everybody at the table got up and left. The Piggly Wiggly murderer sat down with his back to the wall and stared at us. Everybody in the room stared back. Even the guy making the channel-changing stick stopped working to stare at this guy. Here he was, a guy who just a few hours ago blew away his boss and his friend to get their paychecks. The big question on most people’s minds was, how did he plan to cash the checks? This guy was so stupid it took your breath away.

I was staring at the Piggly Wiggly murderer when I heard Porter call me. I could make that phone call now.

“Patience?” I said.

“Are you okay?”

I was blinking fast, trying to hold on. “Patience. I want you to know that if you decide to divorce me, I really do understand. I mean, they said I might get twenty-five years.”

“Then I’ll wait twenty-five years,” Patience said. Her voice had the fire in it I’d come to respect when we ran our business together in Brooklyn. She’d been kind of shy when we first got to Brooklyn, but by the time we left she could take care of herself and keep fifty employees jumping, too. New York will do that to a person. “I’ll get you out,” she said. “I’ll find out who to call.” I nodded and croaked out “I love you” and said good-bye.

I walked along with Porter, feeling broken, back to the federal wing. I’d had it. Too much bad stuff for too long. How would we ever get through this? When Porter led me through the door, he noticed tears in my eyes. “My, my,” Porter said. “Your woman musta been real mad, eh?”

I didn’t answer. I walked into my cell and lay down on my shelf and pulled the ragged blanket up around my head. It is one thing to jeopardize yourself by taking risks, another to hurt other people in the process. I’d gone too far. I’d hurt Patience and Jack, my family, my friends. This pain was more than I’d felt in my life. Under the shroud of my blanket, I cried.

Two hours later, about seven that night, Porter told us our attorney had come.

John and I followed Porter along the hallway. Walking past an intersecting hallway, we saw Ireland, doubled up in pain, lying on the bare concrete floor. “Wait a minute, Porter,” John said.

“C’mon,” Porter said. “Keep moving.”

“That’s Ireland, our codefendant, Porter. He’s supposed to be in the infirmary, not lying on your stinking floor,” John said.

“The infirmary’s too crowded right now,” Porter said. “They’ll take care of him.”

John looked grief-stricken. As captain, his mission had failed, and now the enemy was mistreating one of his men. It was a heavy blow. Porter opened a door and told us to go inside.

The small room was filled with a table and four chairs. It was, however, a clean oasis in a filthy prison. There was a carpet on the floor and the walls were painted white. A man got up from the table, smiled at us, and said, “Dan Bowling. I’m your attorney.”

Bowling looked the part. He wore a tweed jacket over a sweater, a silk tie, tan wool slacks, and brown loafers. He told us he had graduated from Harvard Law School five years before, and his specialty had become drug cases. “I guess it’s because I’m the young attorney in the Charleston gang. Anyway, I get most of the referrals when we have a bust around here.”

Bowling told us our friends, meaning the team, had hired him, through another attorney, that afternoon, and he knew most of the details of the case by talking to the DEA. “You guys were caught with your pants down, that’s a fact,” Bowling said, laughing. “But you were caught by Customs agents, and that may be illegal search and seizure.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because only the Coast Guard can stop people in U.S. waters without just cause. They can stop you to inspect your boat for safety items and stuff. If the Customs people had seen you coming in from beyond the three-mile limit, then they could have stopped you. But they didn’t spot you until you were in the channel.”

“You think that can get us off?” John said.

“Naw. It just means we have a point to argue. We’ll make a motion that the marijuana, the evidence, was illegally obtained. If that works, they could still try you for the crime of smuggling and possession, but they wouldn’t be able to use the pot as evidence.” Bowling laughed. He clearly enjoyed his work. “Makes it tough for the prosecutors. Of course, the judge’ll never rule in our favor, but the threat might help. Might be able to negotiate something with it.”

“What about the missing five hundred pounds of pot?” I said.

“What?” Bowling said.

“Well, we had thirty-five hundred pounds on board. They claim we had three thousand.”

Bowling shrugged. “Well, two things: can you prove you had that much and do you want to increase the severity of your crime by doing so?”

“The count was an estimate,” John said. “We can’t prove how much we had.”

“Nor would you want to,” Bowling said. “Let it be, gents.”

We talked for about a half hour. John told Bowling about Ireland, wanted to know if he could get him taken care of. Bowling said he’d look into it. John said, “Great. And can you lend us ten bucks?”

Bowling smiled, got a bill out of his pocket, and handed it to John. “What’re you going to buy here?”

“Cigarettes, candy, coffee,” John said. “This place is the pits. They serve actual swill for meals. And look what they give us to wear.”

“Hey, boys,” Bowling said, “you guys are in jail in Charleston County, South Carolina. What do you expect?”

“How long?” John said.

“I’ll have you out in four, five days. No problem.”

They took Bob to a local hospital. He had a bad intestinal infection and stayed there overnight. When he came back the next night, he was pale but smiling. John and I gave him a box of instant-coffee packets we’d bought.

That night, at one in the morning, I woke up because somebody was pounding my shoulder. I looked up and saw a big black man, the guy we first met, leaning over me. He said, “Hey. You got any cigarettes?”

I fished out my pack from my pants pocket and handed it to the guy. He took about half the pack and returned the rest. “Light?” I handed him a book of matches and watched the flame light up his face. He was enjoying this. He threw me the matches and walked out of our cell.

We settled into a routine for the next few days. Time was measured by the passage of meals. Breakfast was usually watery grits, an egg, white toast. Lunch was often cold cuts and two slices of white bread. Dinner was invariably rice with some kind of meat: a hot dog, a hamburger patty, a piece of chicken. Between meals, I read. They had a short shelf of books including about ten Horatio Homblower novels. I’d never read them, so I did now. I read every waking moment so I wouldn’t have to think about being in a cage.

Two days later we were taken out of our cell, given our old clothes, which now really smelled like street garbage, and driven back to the courthouse to see the magistrate.

The magistrate set our bonds at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars each. Bowling objected, jumped up and said that the state of South Carolina had set our bonds for these same crimes at ten thousand dollars. A hundred and fifty thousand, Your Honor? As our hired advocate, Bowling put on a great show, turned to us and pointed out what nice-guys-gone-wrong we were (white, college-educated, middle class). The magistrate sighed, agreed to reduce our bonds to only seventy-five thousand each.

Seventy-five thousand dollars was much more money than I could understand. Bowling, in a private meeting at the courthouse, said that our friends wanted us to try to come up with the money ourselves because it would look bad if we just handed over that kind of cash. “They’d think you were part of some big organized crime syndicate or something.”

“Organized? Nobody’d ever accuse us of that if they knew these assholes,” I said.

So I called Patience and told her to try to raise money on our property. That was just wishful thinking. It was possible our ten acres were worth that much, but we owed over half that on our mortgage. The house—or rather, the unfinished cabin—was worth maybe ten thousand. Patience called my father.

Dad had come to my rescue when I had my car wreck in Portugal, and now he came through again. He agreed to guarantee my bond by putting up his condominium as security.

Bowling came to see us every day. One day he brought a document the government wanted us to sign, an inventory of the property confiscated on the Namaste. The list was surprising for the things not listed.

“Hey,” John said, “half the stuff we had with us isn’t even on here.”

Bowling shrugged. “They’ll insist it wasn’t there.”

“They can do that?”

“Sure. Who do you think the judge’ll believe? You or them?”

The loran wasn’t listed, which was fine with me. I wished them a long trip in bad weather with that loran. Any of the boat’s stuff was fair game, I figured. But these guys had taken my shoes, my knife, my calculator, my notebook, and my camera, none of which was on the list. “I don’t care about anything they got,” I told Bowling, “except for my notebook and my camera.”

“What’s so special about them?”

“The notebook is important. I was making notes for my books.”

“Yeah?” Bowling said. “You’re a writer?”

“Yeah. When I’m not smuggling, I try writing.”

Bowling laughed. “And the camera?”

“I had that during my whole tour in Vietnam. It’s a good-luck charm. I have to have it back.”

Bowling nodded. “I’ll check on it.”

“And we just ignore that they took all our stuff?” John said.

“That’s right,” Bowling said. “You start making noises about them stealing your personal stuff, and they’ll be all over you like stink on shit. Let it be.”

Let it be. Play the game nicely and maybe they won’t play hardball.

Captain Horatio Hornblower was blasting the living shit out of a native village on some foreign shore with cannon fire from his ship when Porter yelled, “Mason.”

“Yo.” I never said “Yo” to anybody before I became a criminal.

“Cop here to take you to the courthouse.”

John said, “What about Tillerman and Ireland?”

Porter shook his head.

I got up, breathless. Was it possible? Was I actually getting out of here?

Porter waited while I put my clothes back on for the second time and escorted me up to the reception area. The black deputy who had brought us here was waiting for me by the front door.

“Hello, Mason,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Well, you got a shave, but you still smell like shit.”

I nodded. The deputy got out his handcuffs and cuffed me before we walked out to the car. Just regulations, he reminded me.

We said nothing during the twenty-minute ride to town.

A woman on the elevator at the courthouse glanced at me once on the ride up to the third floor. She quickly looked away. I was a stinking, handcuffed beast.

The elevator door opened and the first person I saw was my father. He stood in the hall smiling widely when he saw me. I couldn’t move my face for fear I would burst into tears and humiliate myself and him. I was in shock. I followed the deputy and just stared at my dad when we walked by him. His face dropped when he saw the grief on mine.

The magistrate said the deputy could take off my cuffs. I sat down while he explained that my dad had put up his apartment for my bail and what that meant. If I broke any of the provisions of my bail, the government would seize my parents’ property. Did I understand?

I nodded.

Would I agree to the restrictions of the bail? No travel outside my county without direct permission from him?

I said yes.

“Okay,” he said. “The police will take you back to the jail so you can be processed out.”

“Back to jail?” I said.

“Yes. To be out-processed.”

“Oh.”

The deputy had to do something else, and while I waited for another cop, they put me in the holding cell down the hall. I paced around the cell for an hour, pissed off. I was technically free—why was I locked up?

Fred, the state cop I had met the night of the bust, came down the hall with a deputy. The deputy unlocked the door and Fred said, “Come on, Mason. I’ll take you back to jail.”

Fred cuffed me, for the sake of the deputy, but took the cuffs off when he stopped at a light a few blocks from the courthouse. “Seems silly to have you cuffed when you’re a free man, don’t you think?”

“Yes. Thanks.” I reached into my shirt pocket and got a cigarette.

“How you feeling?” Fred said.

“Like I’ve been beaten to a pulp.”

“Nobody hit you, did they?”

“No,” I said. “These beatings are strictly self-inflicted.”

I didn’t have to go back to the cell. I just signed out. They gave me my wallet and my watch and my toothbrush. I walked out the glass doors. Nobody even noticed. Law: you are a crook and have to stay inside. Now you are a crook on bail: you may leave. The sun was setting. I looked up and saw my dad waving from a cab. I walked over and got in.

“I’ve got to catch a plane back to Fort Lauderdale,” Dad said. “You want to ride along?”

“Sure. I’ll have the cab take me to the bus station,” I said.

We drove to the airport. I chattered like a machine gun, telling Dad about the bust and how Dave had fucked up and on and on with an intensity arising from the relief of release, I guess. Dad nodded, but didn’t say anything. When I saw the airport signs, I said, “Well. I guess this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

My father looked at me, nodding grimly. “I’ll say.”

When he got out at the airport, I got out with him to say good-bye and to thank him for doing so much for me. I tried to hug him, something that is not done in my family. But he couldn’t. As he walked into the airport, I said, “Thanks, Dad.”

He nodded and smiled and disappeared into the airport lobby.

The cabby took me to the Charleston Greyhound bus stop at six. The clerk said the next bus to Jacksonville was leaving at eleven. I sat in the waiting room for five hours, feeling miserable. I was coming down with something. Maybe the flu. I had a fever, congestion, a cough. I wanted to sleep, but there’s nothing in a Greyhound bus station but chairs.

At three in the morning, I was in Jacksonville waiting for a bus to take me to Gainesville.

At seven, I got off the bus in downtown Gainesville and saw Patience waiting outside the station. Her face lit up when she saw me.

She ran to me and we hugged. “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

CHAPTER 21

I was knocked out of commission for a week with the flu. I believe now that it was my body’s reaction to the stress.

One by one, our friends learned I had been arrested in South Carolina. They were amazed. I just didn’t look like a smuggler, they said. I reminded them that murderers look normal, too, just to put their thoughts in perspective.

Patience wanted to quit the paper route because it was destroying the new Rabbit. We couldn’t, that was our only income. We sold the school bus for $750, which kept us alive for another month.

Jack seemed unaffected when I sold the bus, his room. He was quite stoic. Patience had said he was shocked when she told him I’d been arrested. When I got home, he was reassuring and laughed at my stories of life in a county jail. He was protecting us, I believe. He didn’t want us to feel any worse than we did.

I had a real problem concentrating. In the mornings I worked on my robot book because I believed, or hoped, that I could write and if I kept at it, I would eventually succeed. When I began to lose this conviction, Patience would remind me. If someone is working to support you by running a paper route and encourages you to stay home and plink on a typewriter, how can you not be a believer?

One afternoon my agent, Knox, called.

“Guess what?” Knox said. He sounded happy. He didn’t know I’d been arrested.

“What?” I said.

“I just sold Chickenhawk to Viking. What d’you think of that?”

My heart jumped. The title was strange to hear. I’d sent the manuscript in untitled. A week later, I’d found the basis for the title in the manuscript. It came from a conversation I’d written between Jerry Towler and me in Vietnam about the contrast between being afraid to get into the battles and how you felt when you finally got into them. A chicken before the battle. A hawk during the battle. Chickenhawk. Somebody bought my book? “What?”

“I said I just sold your book to Viking!”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch!” I yelled.

We laughed together on the phone for a while. This was really coming from behind. Knox had been trying to sell my manuscript for over nine months. I’d given up and put my energy into the robot book. Now what?

“You finish it,” Knox said. “Your editor is a guy named Gerald Howard. He thinks a December deadline is about right. That okay with you?”

“Sure. I’ve got part one finished. Two to go. I think I can do it.”

“Great,” Knox said. “They’re not paying you a whole hell of a lot for this, Bob. The advance, I mean. You’re a complete unknown, and they don’t even know if you can finish the book.”

“I understand. I don’t care how much they pay.”

“Well, the advance is seventy-five hundred total. They’ll pay you twenty-five hundred now, for the first part, and twenty-five hundred for each of the two parts you owe them upon delivery and acceptance.”

I was quiet for a while and said, “Knox. Something’s happened you should know about.”

“What?”

“I got in trouble a few weeks ago. Big trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I was arrested on a sailboat loaded with marijuana. Three thousand pounds of marijuana.”

“Jesus, Bob. When you fuck up, you don’t mess around, do you?”

“Yeah, I don’t like to do things halfway. Do you think I should tell them? Viking?”

“Ah,” Knox said, thinking. “Why don’t we just not mention it for a while? When do you go to trial?”

“Sometime in March.”

“Any chance you can get off?”

“Our lawyer says we’ll lose the trial, but we might win the appeal. Might work, he claims. I think not.”

“I’m really sorry, Bob,” Knox said. He wasn’t angry. He was concerned. We talked for a while, said good-bye. I hung up. I’m not a very excitable person, but I found that I was not able to stand still. I was overcome with joy. I began to jump up and down on the floor. Our dog, Chocolate, began to bark and dance around with me. Patience was working, Jack was in school. I jumped, hopped, and pirouetted all over the cabin. An hour later, I had found my copy of the manuscript buried in a cardboard box. I dusted it off and began reading it to see where I was.

Knox sent a thousand dollars as an advance on my advance.

Our trial was set for March. Bowling’s strategy was to have a bench trial—because, he said, we would lose a jury trial anyway—and then appeal the decision. It wasn’t what I had in mind. I imagined a jury listening to my background and seeing what led to my decision to get on the boat. Bowling said it would be pointless, that the jury had to follow the law: we were caught red-handed, the law said we were guilty as hell. I know now that a jury doesn’t have to rule against you simply because you broke the law; they can free you, declare you innocent against all evidence to the contrary, if they believe circumstances ameliorate your actions. Peer review is the cornerstone of the American legal system. I didn’t understand this then, and even if I had, I’d probably go with the team again. I was, after all, guilty. This was to be a team play, and I was one of the team.

I developed writing habits dictated by my environment. By noon, the attic was unbearable. We had insulation in the roof, but it wasn’t sealed off with plasterboard, so the heat eventually seeped past the insulation and into the attic space, which was our bedroom and my office. I wrote on a glass tabletop set on plastic milk crates. Abe Weiner had given me the tabletop when I left Brooklyn. I sat on an old telephone operator’s chair, which I’d assumed would be comfortable because telephone operators sit all day. I was wrong. They say women have more padding. I wouldn’t know, but the chair made my ass numb in a couple of hours. I had written Knox that if he sold my manuscript, I was going to buy a new chair, but I didn’t. I wrote for three hours in the morning and reviewed what I wrote in the afternoon, downstairs.

When Patience came home around five, she’d immediately sit down and want to see what I had written that day.

“How’d it go today?” Patience’d ask.

“Shitty. I just can’t seem to make it come out the way I think it.”

“That must be tough,” she’d say, and read the two or three pages and almost always say, “I can’t believe you. This is terrific, Bob. This is going to be an important book.”

I’d shrug this off in the cabin and go outside and grin. Without Patience’s feedback and encouragement, I don’t know what I would have done. Writing is real work with no immediate reward. The process seems ineffectual—you type all day and you’re not a penny ahead for it. Patience goes to work and brings back money. I work for hours and all I have to show for it is two or three pages added to the stack. Maybe when I actually got some money for it—

When I got the contract from Viking and the first check, I finally believed I’d actually sold a book. My writing went easier because this book was sold. This was real. I took Patience and Jack out to dinner the day I got the check. It was a proud moment.

Now all I had to do was finish the book.

And get through the trial.

CHAPTER 22

“All rise. The Fifth District Federal Court is now in session. The Honorable Judge Solomon Blatt, Jr., presiding.”

We’d met Judge Blatt earlier, when he had us come in to make sure we wanted to have a bench trial and that we wanted it together. He believed there were sufficient differences in our backgrounds and our involvement to warrant separate trials. We agreed to stand as a team. This was the solidarity of ignorant, self-perceived heroes, represented by a lawyer who was being paid by people whose interests were different.

Sol Blatt, Jr., then got on with it.

They called as witnesses the three Customs agents, who tried to make a case that they knew we’d come in from beyond U.S. territorial waters because our searchlight was so bright. However, the differences between the three men’s testimonies was so great that Bowling easily discredited this theory.

The one piece of evidence that proved that we’d actually come in from abroad was a single universal plotting chart they’d found on the boat, one we missed throwing away. We knew the prosecution had this, but at the last moment the government changed prosecutors. The new prosecutor didn’t know what they had or he didn’t understand what it meant—it was just a piece of paper with pencil lines drawn on it. So far, there wasn’t proof we were smugglers. Not that it made much difference. Possession and distribution charges were enough to send us to jail for a long time.

The Customs agents said that the reason they stopped us was they’d heard there was a mother ship coming in that night, and it might be serviced by sailboats. It was a rumor they’d heard.

Bowling made a case for illegal search and seizure based on the fact that there was nothing suspicious about the appearance of our boat—the lights were right, the waterline was right—and there was no evidence we were coming in from international waters. He moved that the case be dismissed on these grounds. The judge decided not to so decide.

Then the prosecution called one of the state cops to the stand. That cop told the judge we had sailed from Jacksonville on December 2, 1980, picked up the marijuana in Colombia, and spent a total of forty-four days on the trip. We were, indeed, smugglers.

John and I looked at each other. How’d they get that?

Then we heard them call Ireland to the stand.

He walked up to be sworn in, his shoulders sagging. Suddenly Ireland’s sad looks before the trial made more sense. He’d talked during the post arrest questioning.

Ireland sat down. He glanced at John and me with a look of dread. He confirmed the cop’s testimony, said we’d sailed to Colombia and picked up the marijuana.

Bowling then pointed out a rule of law that baffles me to this day. The rule states that if one of a group of defendants admits to committing a crime, his testimony cannot be used against the other defendants. I don’t know why this is. I don’t understand law. But it’s true. The judge agreed. He announced that Ireland’s testimony could not be used against defendants Mason and Tillerman, only against defendant Ireland.

The cops in the back of the courthouse groaned. They needn’t have. Everything was going their way.

There wasn’t much to this case. We were on a boat loaded with marijuana. They caught us. Our only defense was that they may have caught us illegally. The judge declared a recess until after lunch.

We ate at a restaurant near the courthouse. Dan Bowling bought, he being the only person with enough money. He said things were going fine.

“Fine?” I said. “We’re going to be found guilty.”

“Of course you are,” Bowling said. “You are guilty. Now all we have to do is wait until sentencing and then appeal the case.”

“You think we have a chance in hell?” John asked.

“Hell if I know. I know it’s your only chance.”

Ireland sat quietly with his girlfriend, Donna. He wouldn’t look John or me in the eye. I wanted to tell him I understood. Shit, he’d been up for three days, he’d been sick, they’d put the pressure on. The only thing he neglected, I thought, was going ahead and telling them where Dave and the gang lived. I mean, as long as he was going to talk, why not stick it to Dave? As it was, the only person he hurt was himself.

It only took a half hour for Judge Blatt to finish up after lunch.

Guilty.

John and I were guilty of possession and possession with the intent to distribute. Ireland was guilty of smuggling an illegal substance, possession, and possession with the intent to distribute. It made sense. Everyone knew we were all three on the same boat, but only Ireland was the smuggler. Law is fun.

It didn’t hit too hard. We knew we were guilty. And the way Bowling had described it, we seemed to be right on track with some incredibly clever Harvard lawyer trick. Shit, we had the government right where we wanted them. Blatt said we could continue on our bonds and come back in August for sentencing.

I wrote every morning and carried a notebook around with me wherever I went, scribbling notes when I remembered something that I had to put in the book. I wanted to deliver the second part of the manuscript before I was sentenced in August so if Judge Blatt let me go to New York, my editor would have seen it. Patience and I wanted to continue on from Charleston after sentencing, drive to New York on our way to her mother’s cabin in Maine.

While I was writing the second part of the book, I wanted to talk to somebody else who was in Vietnam with me. I missed Jerry Towler. He and I had flown together most of our tours. I wrote him a letter and sent it to the Pentagon, requesting that they forward it.

Tension was tearing me apart. My nightly jump-ups were back as severe as ever. I’d leap awake with a pulse rate of 140 or more two or three times a night. The idea that I was actually going to go to jail made me feel sick. I went to the Veterans Administration and asked for help. They gave me Valium and enrolled me in a biofeedback program that was designed to teach me relaxation techniques.

My life was writing and thinking about Vietnam while trying desperately to achieve peace of mind. I began to read books on metaphysics, philosophy, Zen, in my quest for mental peace. I discovered Alan Watts’s books. The Book was very good, and I systematically read almost everything Watts had written. I loved concepts like: “When you die, you will wake and realize you were never born.” Great stuff. Just try applying it to daily life. Zen was more appealing. I discovered some peace through meditation. I also discovered a different way of looking at reality which I still find useful. It was a revelation to me that Zen was just “direct pointing,” looking at yourself, your surroundings, the universe for what they really were—illusions, interpretations of sensory input inside your own head. I liked that. Then I worried who was doing the interpretations and what was who? However, I was thinking. The problem gave life an interesting perspective and helped to divert my thoughts from my troubles.

I finished the second part of my book before we went to Charleston. I called it “Swave and Deboner” because that’s how the combat helicopter pilots referred to themselves in Vietnam. We lived in the mud, in tents, like any other grunt, but aviation was supposed to be glamorous. Suave and debonair.

Sentencing was very tough on us because our families came to testify as character witnesses. We waited in the hallway outside the courtroom until we were two hours past our scheduled appearance. John and I had told Ireland we understood, held no grudge, but he was sheepish around us. He really harbored a lot of guilt about talking to the police.

When we finally got in the courtroom, the judge was just finishing up a previous defendant. This guy had been caught smuggling pot for the third time. Blatt listened to a tearful and extended plea from the man’s wife and promptly sentenced him to five years in a penitentiary. The guy started yelling at Blatt and had to be dragged from the courtroom in handcuffs.

Blatt apologized to us for the delay and announced a recess until after lunch. My mother-in-law, Constance Hartwell, and my father had flown in on my behalf, and worried that their planes were leaving soon.

I sat in a restaurant across from my mother-in-law and my father. I couldn’t eat. My mind roiled with excuses that I thought should be heard. I kept saying that pot shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. My mother-in-law said, “But it is, Bob.”

She was right. And before they’d finished eating, I’d managed to recognize that even if marijuana was legal, I still would’ve been guilty of illegal trafficking of a controlled substance. People still go to jail for smuggling alcohol and cigarettes. So when I went back to the courtroom, it was with the hope that Judge Sol Blatt, Jr., would somehow read my mind, see my fear and regret, take pity on my racked and bruised soul, and, in light of all this, not throw me into prison. Maybe he’d make me do work in my community for a few years. What I wanted was just one damn break from the government, please.

When the court reconvened, the judge asked us each to come forward with our character witnesses.

John’s father humbled himself before the judge and told him his son was a veteran of Vietnam, and he was sure this was an isolated mistake. Couldn’t he give him a break?

My mother-in-law and my father did the same thing. And then Patience stood before Blatt and said, her voice trembling, “Your Honor. My husband didn’t want to do this. He thought he had to do it to provide for his family. I know him to be an honorable man who has made this one mistake.” Her voice cracked. I looked over. Tears ran down her cheeks as she said, “He’s sorry, Your Honor.”

Blatt wanted to know what I had to say. My head buzzed. I had a lot to say. I wanted to go through this whole thing more carefully. I wanted people to know my motives, my troubled thoughts, I wanted people that were deciding my fate to know me. I stared at Sol Blatt, Jr. His face showed he was unhappy, too. I saw also that he was braced to deliver justice, even if it was painful to him, too. I said, simply, hopelessly, “I’m sorry I made the trip, Your Honor.”

When we finished, my father and my mother-in-law excused themselves because they both had to catch flights back home. We went back to our seats.

Blatt then made a short speech about how he hated to see the effects of the drug culture on people like us. He said that he, too, was a combat veteran, World War II, and he felt a strong empathy toward John and me. He added that, from the facts of the case, it was obvious that we were rank amateurs.

I felt my pulse racing in my temples. I was afraid I’d pass out, I was so excited. This was one of those long preambles that leads to the big word: But. Finally Blatt said that despite all this, we had indeed done the deed. And he was not going to let people smuggle drugs into South Carolina and get away with it.

He read the sentences. John Tillerman, the captain of the boat—seven years in a minimum-security federal prison. Robert Ireland, the only defendant convicted of smuggling—six years at a minimum-security federal prison. Robert Mason, agreed to be a minor figure in the crime, Blatt’s most lenient sentence—five years in the minimum-security prison closest to my home.

Five years.

I knew of murderers who’d gotten less. I knew of rapists who’d gotten less. In Miami and New York, they give people suspended sentences for similar crimes. First offense? Five years?

Bowling immediately stood up and said we were going to appeal the case on the grounds that the government illegally stopped and searched us. Blatt said fine, good luck. Bowling asked that we be allowed to remain free on our bonds. Blatt agreed. Bowling asked if Patience and I could travel to Maine to vacation and work.

“What kind of work?” Blatt asked.

“Your Honor, Mr. Mason has sold a book he’s writing about his experiences in Vietnam.”

“Really? I’d like to read that.” Blatt looked at me. “When does it come out?” The man had just sentenced me to prison and now we were making small talk?

“Ah, I don’t know, Your Honor. I haven’t finished it.”

“Fine. I’m sure I’ll hear about it. Yes, you have my permission to go to Maine. Good luck, Mr. Mason.”

In the hallway outside the courtroom, we asked Bowling what these sentences meant. How long would we actually stay in jail?

“Normally,” Bowling said, “you can figure serving about a third of the sentence. Two, two and a half years, I’d guess.”

“What about the appeal? How long will that take?”

“Months. Maybe a year.”

“What do we do while we’re waiting?”

“Anything you want—as long as you don’t violate your bail.”

Bowling said he had something for me at his office. Patience and I stopped there on the way out of town. He led me into his office and pulled my camera out of his desk drawer. “Just showed up,” he said. “Imagine that.” I thanked him. Some cops might be crooks, too, but at least they respected a man’s talismans. Besides, it was an old camera. My notebook, however, was gone for good.

By three in the afternoon, Patience and I were on the highway headed for New York City.

I was giddy with happiness, chattering away like a hyperactive kid while Patience drove. Jack had stayed home, busy with his job and his girlfriend, Wallie. I guess I was in shock. We stopped at a motel after dark. I called my mother and told her the verdict. She became hysterical, shrieking things about Patience being the cause of it all. She was in the midst of saying a lot of nasty things I knew she really didn’t mean when I hung up. I was a mother’s innocent son. I told Patience: “It’s great practice in realizing that words are only sound waves.”

The next morning I was no longer chattering and happy; I was quiet and morose. We picked up a Charleston paper and saw a small writeup about our conviction. We wondered if the Florida papers would mention it.

We spent one more night on the road so we’d get to the city in the morning. I’d called Knox and told him we were coming.

We drove through Brooklyn, took a ride around the old mirror factory. It was just a warehouse again. Mirage was closed.

Knox’s office was in Greenwich Village. We got to his place around ten. His wife, Kitty Sprague, let us in. Knox beamed and said, “Author, author.” I smiled, but after the reality of the sentencing, being an author just paled to insignificance. “Thanks, Knox. By the way, I just got sentenced to five years in prison. You think you could lend me three hundred bucks?”

“You’re broke?” Knox asked.

“Yep. Twenty-five hundred doesn’t last as long as it used to.”

“Where you going from here?”

“Thought I’d go meet my editor at Viking and then Patience and I are going to Maine.”

“You going to work up there or are you going to fuck off?”

“No time to fuck off. I can work there as well as anywhere.”

Patience parked near a fire hydrant on a side street in the middle of New York City and waited for me. I walked into a huge building on Madison Avenue and took the elevator up to the Viking Penguin floors. While I waited in the reception area, I felt a lot like a poor relation visiting a rich uncle. After a minute, Gerald Howard came out. He was a young guy, younger than he’d sounded on the phone. He still didn’t know about my arrest and he looked to me then like someone who’d turn pale if he knew he was talking to a convicted felon. We went to his office.

We chatted. Gerald sat in front of a window overlooking the city.

I could see a comer of Central Park in the distance. The differences between our worlds were profound, but we had an overlapping interest—Chickenhawk. By some strange process that I still don’t understand, my manuscript came to be read by someone who liked it and could do something about publishing it. Gerald Howard was the right man at the right time. He was a young editor in the Penguin paperback division, and he wanted to be a hardback editor for Viking. This was to be Howard’s first hardback book. He had just gotten the second part of my book a couple of days before and had already read it. I was relieved to hear him say it stood up to the first part, was even, in fact, better.

While Howard talked, I was distracted and made poor conversation. The fact that I’d just been sentenced to prison wouldn’t leave me. I kept thinking about Patience waiting downstairs, and felt conscious of the time. I told Gerry, as he insisted I call him, that I was happy he liked my book, but that Patience was the real writer in the family. She’d be famous someday. I looked at my watch and said I really ought to be going and how soon did he think Viking would be sending me a check.

“I’ll get them to expedite the check,” Gerry said. “Knox says you’re broke.”

“That’s a fact. And—” I almost said and going to jail, but I was afraid they’d change their minds. I shrugged.

“Well, that’s going to change,” Gerry said. “I have a good feeling about this book.”

Gerry walked me back to the reception area and we said good-bye.

By dusk the next day, Patience and I were in a cabin on a lake in Maine.

Patience has lots of relatives, and they all come to Maine in the summer. Aunt Priscilla stayed two cabins down the shore, Aunt Pat lived two cabins up the shore. Uncle Roger lived across the lake. Patience’s brother Chris lived up the road year-round; her sister Vickie, also a permanent resident, lived three miles away. They all knew me because Patience and I had been here while I was in the Army, before and after Vietnam. Now they knew I’d been convicted, was going to jail, and also that I’d sold a book. Nobody, including me, knew how to act, proud or ashamed.

I had my electric typewriter and a pack of paper. That’s all it takes to be a writer. I worked at the kitchen table in the cabin. And as long as I worked, I felt okay. I began part three, which I called “Short Timer’s Blues.” This was a tough one to remember. Near the end of our tours, the pilots were just plain overworked. I and my buddy, Jerry Towler (who I was calling Gary Resler in the book because I still hadn’t heard from him), had each flown close to a thousand missions by the time we’d transferred to the Forty-eighth Aviation Company, called the Blue Stars. As we got closer to our departure date, and as the missions got hotter and hotter, and when the Army forgot about their promise to rotate short-timers back to ass-and-trash duty in Saigon and other places, I began to have real problems: hallucinations. I saw my electric razor burst into flames—as real as life—in the mosquito netting over my cot one night near Dak To. I had weird periods when I’d lose my balance while I walked. I had temporary blackouts when I’d see my face suddenly an inch from the page of a book I was reading and not know how I got there. I was losing it.

And now I was losing it in Maine.

I’d quit writing after lunch and go for walks in the woods with Patience. It was no good. I’d walk a few hundred feet and get breathless. I felt like a deflated balloon. All my strength left me when I tried to relax. I stayed in the cabin and read. I was reading The World According to Garp, which I liked very much. In the evenings, Vickie and her husband, Peter, usually came down to the cabin and we sat around and talked. I played chess with Peter.

When everybody went home, when Patience and I went to bed, I’d sit bolt upright against the headboard, unable to sleep. My pulse raced. I had chest pains. My hearing would mysteriously fade in and out, like someone switching the balance on a stereo. I tried the meditation tricks the VA had taught me. I could relax every muscle in my body to absolute biofeedback perfection and still feel undefined panic take over.

For two months I wrote every morning, read every afternoon, and panicked when it was quiet and I was alone with myself. Even Alan Watts’s heartening words about life, the universe, and everything were of no comfort.

In October Patience started cleaning houses in Gainesville to make ends meet.

By Christmas 1981, I’d finished the manuscript and sent it to Viking. Gerry Howard called. He’d found out I was going to jail by reading the last page of the manuscript. He told me he was behind me all the way and so was Viking. He told me that the editing process would take a while—he expected the book would get to the stores sometime early in 1983, over a year after I’d finished it.

I got a letter from Jerry Towler. He sounded just like he had in Vietnam. I don’t know why that was so surprising except that sixteen years had passed since I’d last seen him. He said he and his wife, Martie, were taking their two sons to Disney World and why didn’t they stop by? I wondered how to break the news to my long-lost brother-in-arms that I was soon to be a convict.

A week later, Jerry called. They were in High Springs. Patience and I drove into town to show them the way to our cabin. When I saw him sitting in his car, I noticed he’d changed. He used to be a young, skinny guy; now he was older, thicker. He remarked that I’d changed, too. In just a few minutes, the changes became invisible and the guy I’d flown with was back, grinning the same impish grin. He introduced me to Martie and his two sons, Greg and Ryan, and we got back into our cars and drove out to the cabin.

I gave them a tour of our woods. I’d cut a mile and a half of trails through it and considered the whole woods a home. Certain clearings were like rooms to me. I showed them the local plants and bugs and especially the spiders. Huge orb weavers, called banana spiders by the locals, and Nephila clavipes in spider books, were special to me. I’d been studying them for years. Their silk is the strongest natural fiber in the world and is used to make string and fishnets in Central and South America. Martie was decidedly unimpressed, even when I showed her you could stick your finger right up to the face of one of these three-inch spiders. “See, it won’t bite. Not unless you grab it,” I said. Martie shuddered and wondered if we could go back to the cabin now.

We had lunch and talked for the few hours they could spare. I kept trying to think of some smooth way to break the news that I was soon going to jail, but I couldn’t. I decided to let Jerry read about it. I promised that I’d have Viking send him an advance copy. “Yeah. Then it’s too late for me to make it right,” Jerry said.

“I know. Too bad we didn’t find each other sooner.”

“I bet you didn’t even mention how many times I saved your life,” Jerry said.

“You saved my life?” I said. I turned to Martie. “Martie, you wouldn’t have this guy as a husband or those two handsome boys if it wasn’t for me being there to keep him from killing himself trying to fly that helicopter.”

“Now I know who to blame,” Martie said with a grin.

When they drove away, I felt guilty. Jerry and Martie were the epitome of the middle-class, hardworking, honest American family and I was a convicted drug smuggler.

Editing was completed by June 1982, and Viking published a bound galley they sent out to reviewers. I made a few changes in the galley, including the fact that Jerry had gotten shot down during the la Drang Valley campaign, spent the night on the ground with the grunts, was nearly overrun in an all-out Viet Cong attack. I’d forgotten that until Jerry talked about it on his visit.

I started working on my robot book again.

My lawyer called to say the district court of appeals had decided not to overrule Judge Blatt’s decision. The vote was three to two. The next step was to take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. “You won’t get a hearing there,” Bowling said.

“So what’s the point?” I said.

“The outside chance they’ll hear it,” Bowling said. “And you’re free until they decide.”

John and I argued over whether we should continue the appeal. I was in favor of checking into jail now and getting it over with. John said that if a shred of hope remained, he wanted to wait to see what happened. Patience wanted me with her, too. I wasn’t courageous enough to go to jail, so I waited.

CHAPTER 23

August 1983—Chickenhawk was officially published.

A first copy came from Gerry by Federal Express. I opened the package. I’d seen the cover, I’d seen the jacket copy, but seeing my manuscript as a fresh-paper, wet-ink actual hardbound book gave me a shot of adrenaline. I put it on a bookshelf with some other books and waited for Patience to come back from shopping. When she got home, I pretended to be busy at the table, and said, “Hand me that dictionary, will you? You know, the one over there.” I pointed to the bookcase. She walked over, looking for the dictionary, and saw Chickenhawk. She squealed with delight, grabbed the book, and came over and punched me in the stomach. It was a happy moment.

I had the book in my hands, but it wasn’t yet in the stores. Viking had sent out review copies. Whether anyone would hear about it was now up to the reviewers.

Robert Wilson published the first review of Chickenhawk in USA Today. Wilson was impressed when I said, about the men in the burn ward I visited, “I saw 18-year-old boys with their faces burned away, bright pink skin stretched over strange, stunted noses. Had someone photographed the men there, twisted and deformed with featureless faces, by the hundreds, the war might have ended sooner. But probably not.” The cynicism of the last line struck Wilson and he went on to say, “If I sound just a little overwrought, I defy you to read this straightforward, in many ways under-wrought, narrative and feel any differently.”

These first reviews took my breath away. John Del Vecchio (author of The Thirteenth Valley) said in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Chickenhawk had me trembling in my seat—fidgeting—wanting it to stop—wanting to get those guys up, off the LZs. Powerful scenes in this personal narrative… made me cry. By the time I was a third into this book, it had me.”

Larry Heinemann (author of Close Quarters) entitled his Chicago Sun-Times review, “hacking it in a Huey: a superb memoir of Vietnam.”

I had always imagined reviewers laughing at my feeble attempts to be a writer. This was amazing. And not one of these reviews mentioned my legal problems and that I was on my way to prison.

The man I figured would be my toughest reviewer, Towler (still known as Resler in the book), sent me a letter. Towler would know if I’d gotten it right. He’d also now know all about my secret life as a crook. The following is an extract of that letter:

The next day, Dan Bowling called to tell me the Supreme Court had refused to hear our appeal.

“Now what?” I said.

“The Bureau of Prisons will be in touch. Count on it. Could be a month. Could be a few days.”

Knox called me on the morning of August fourth. “I’m sure you don’t get the New York Times down there in the swamps.”

“I’ve heard some people saw one in Gainesville, couple years ago.”

“Great. You have just been reviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the Times. And it’s a great review. Got a minute?”

“Sure.”

Knox read me the review.

Lehmann-Haupt started by calling Chickenhawk a “remarkable journal based on a year spent flying assault helicopters… in Vietnam.” He said, “So compelling are Mason’s technical details that only by subliminal degrees do we become aware of his mounting battle fatigue.” He ended the review this way: I wish I could close by quoting in full one of the scenes in which Mr. Mason demonstrates his use of detail… But each of these scenes is too long to be quoted in full. Besides, it is the even longer combat scenes that catch the real flavor of Chickenhawk. It is to combat that Bob Mason is always drawn, no matter how frightened he feels… And in that paradox lies the terror of his hypnotic narrative. It is combat that becomes his natural environment. Combat becomes the only habitat in which he feels alive. Combat possesses his dreams long after he has left the war. And in realizing this, he discovers that he has gone quite mad.

I was stunned. Lehmann-Haupt seemed to get it, and I was happy that I’d gotten through.

To illustrate the power of the Times, at noon the same day the review came out a producer from the Today Show called. She wanted to know if I could be on the show. I said I’d have to check with Judge Blatt, I’d let her know. By two o’clock, People magazine and Time magazine had called to arrange interviews. By late in the day, a clerk from Sol Blatt’s office called me to say that the judge had no objection to me traveling to New York since it was part of my work, but, the clerk stressed, when I was assigned a date to go to prison I had to report immediately, no matter what television show I was scheduled to be on.

Suddenly everybody knew I’d written a book. Almost none of them knew I was also going to jail. None of the reviews mentioned my pending incarceration. The Today Show people found out when I told the producer that my trip was subject to clearance by a judge.

Towler insisted on flying down from Michigan to help out while all this was going on. He wanted to see what I was going to wear on television. I showed him a blazer I had bought years before in New York. Storage in our cabin had spawned several colonies of mildew. “You can’t wear that on the Today show!” Jerry insisted.

“Why not? Most of the stains are on the pocket and on the back. I’ll be sitting down.”

“C’mon, take me into town. You need something to wear. I’m not going to let you embarrass helicopter pilots.”

We went to J.C. Penny’s and Jerry helped me pick out a new blazer, some shirts, pants, and a tie. Knowing I had very little money, he insisted on buying this stuff for me.

That night Jerry brought out a box of slides he’d taken in Vietnam. We saw ourselves, two skinny kids again, filling sandbags for our bunker at Dak To; touring a village where a kid tried to sell me a dead baby; in the cockpit of our Huey; making coffee next to our helicopter in a rice paddy. Time travel. He showed a slide of me standing on smooth red clay, staring into the camera. I didn’t remember being there. Jerry said it was taken after the battle at Plei Me, didn’t I remember? No. I recognized that it was Plei Me; but I couldn’t remember the picture being taken. I couldn’t remember being there. Behind me were a score of Vietnamese bodies, men who’d been hit with 20mm cannon fire from strafing American fighters. They were eviscerated, beheaded, twisted, and horrible. I didn’t remember it at all. If it wasn’t for the slide, I’d still say I hadn’t been there. I wondered what else I’d forgotten.

We stayed up until early morning talking. I realized that Jerry and I had become brothers through our shared experience in that war.

The next day, when I did a book signing at Goering’s Bookstore in Gainesville, a Time photographer showed up, too. Jerry and Patience stood behind the photographer goofing it up to make me smile. I was feeling the exhilaration that comes from such attention. I’d never had so much recognition in my life.

Jerry left the next day, satisfied that I was prepared for my New York trip. He told Patience that if she needed anything, call.

The court called. I had to report to Eglin Federal Prison at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, on Friday, August 19. I’d have just enough time to go to New York.

I flew to New York on Monday the fifteenth. I cabbed to the hotel where NBC puts up its talk-show guests. I had phone messages—a reporter from a paper in Texas, another from my childhood home area newspaper, the Palm Beach Post-Times, and several others. I did phone interviews for a couple of hours. Then I walked down the street to a restaurant to meet Gerry Howard and some other Viking Penguin people. I met my publicist, my copy editor, and the assistant publisher over a meal. I don’t recall what I ate. I don’t recall what I said.

After dinner, Gerry took me to a nice bar and wanted to know if I needed more money. I said an extra couple thousand’d be nice. He said, “How about another seventy-five hundred?”

At six-thirty Tuesday morning a young woman, a publicist, picked me up at the hotel and took me to the NBC studios.

I sat in a barber chair while a guy put makeup on my face.

I sat in the Green Room holding a cup of coffee, watching the monitor. The producer told me Bryant Gumbel had read most of my book. Over film clips of helicopters flying in Vietnam, a voice said, “Coming up, Robert Mason, author of the new best-selling book, Chickenhawk.”

“Where’d they get the best-selling bit?” I said.

The publicist shrugged. “Can’t hurt.”

I was so excited that I was beginning to lose track of reality. I followed a guy into the studio in an apprehensive trance. I sat in a chair behind a desk. The guy next to me leaned over and said he was Bryant Gumbel. “I know this is strange to you, Robert, but just try to act naturally.”

I nodded. Three huge television cameras stared at me. I saw a commercial playing on one monitor, Gumbel and me on another, and a close-up of my face on another. My eyes looked puffy, but my new blazer and tie looked okay. I saw a script roll through the prompters on the cameras, Gumbel’s lines. I realized then that millions of people, no exaggeration, were going to be watching. I had no lines.

Somebody said, “Five seconds, Bryant.” The camera light blinked red. Gumbel asked a question. I answered. We did this for five minutes. I don’t know what I said. I do remember the last question, though.

“Robert,” said Gumbel, “I understand something special is happening to you in a few days.”

I nodded. “Yes, Bryant. Friday I’m going to prison.”

CHAPTER 24

The prison had sent us a letter telling us what we were allowed to bring. I decided to take everything they allowed, whether I had it or not. I bought a bamboo flute and a tennis racket simply because I was allowed to have them.

People Magazine, interested in the writer-going-to-prison slant, sent writer David Chandler and photographer Lynn Pelham to interview me the day before I was due to report to Eglin. Pelham had me pack up a bag and walk out the door so they could show Patience and Jack waving good-bye: Dad marches off to jail. They promised they’d see me at Eglin to complete the story: Dad arrives at jail.

Patience and I drove over and picked up John and Alice and then drove a short distance to say good-bye to my parents. Dad had retired a few months before, had bought a little seven-acre farm near us, and puttered around growing vegetables and raising chickens, pigs, and cows.

My father was stoic, my mother was in tears. I told them I’d be back soon.

We drove two hundred miles to Fort Walton Beach and found a seaside motel. This was my treat. Gerry Howard had come through with more money against future royalties. They’d sold out the first printing of Chickenhawk (five thousand copies); we’d already made back my advance.

I wanted to spend my last night savoring freedom, eating a nice meal, making love. I couldn’t taste what I ate. I couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything. The fact that I was going to voluntarily walk into a prison the next day produced emotions too powerful to ignore. I felt like I had just before the assaults in Vietnam. I felt myself falling into a dark abyss.

The next day at noon, we drove to the main entrance of Eglin, the largest Air Force base in the world. The guard at the gate asked us what we wanted. I told him we were checking into prison.

The guard looked at me and smiled. “You the helicopter pilot? The guy who wrote the book?”

“Yep,” I said.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” the guard said. He stood back and saluted. I returned the salute and drove on.

In one small corner of this huge military installation is a small group of buildings called the Eglin Federal Prison Camp. The camp was indistinguishable from the other buildings on the base. There were no fences, no walls, no guard towers. Just a cluster of buildings with a sign out front. We walked into the administration building. A guy dressed in blue asked us what we wanted.

“We’re checking in,” I said.

“Everybody’s at lunch,” the man said. “Take a seat.”

We sat.

After lunch, a man came down the hallway. “Robert Mason and John Tillerman?”

“Yessir.”

“Welcome to Eglin Prison Camp, men.” The man, Captain Raulings, looked at Patience and Alice and said, “You should say good-bye to your ladies now. They can come visit you tomorrow. Visitors can come Saturday and Sunday.”

I hugged Patience while tears spilled down her cheeks.

I stood in the hall with my bag and my tennis racket and my bamboo flute, feeling like a recently orphaned immigrant.

“Okay, men,” Captain Raulings said. “Let’s check in.”

While we filled out forms in a small room, Captain Raulings came in and said that the warden wanted to see me. “The warden never sees new prisoners,” he said. “You must be a real fuckup.”

Although everybody called the head of Eglin Prison Camp a warden, he was officially a superintendent. Superintendent Robert Honsted had a large office. He invited me to sit.

“Mr. Mason,” he said, “because of all the publicity about you coming here, you are what we call a high-profile prisoner. That means we have to treat you differently than the rest of the prisoners. You won’t be allowed to work on the Air Force base like most of the prisoners do. You’ll be confined to the camp. We don’t want reporters interfering with day-to-day prison business, as might happen if you’re out on the base, in public.”

I said I understood, though I thought the designation high profile was a little extreme.

“What was the name of that book you wrote?”

“Chickenhawk.”

“Is it any good?”

“I guess so.”

“Maybe I’ll buy a copy.” Honsted stood up. I got up. “Okay, Mr. Mason. Good luck.”

When I returned to the in-processing routine, a guard checked my bag. When he found four large vials of Valium he just grinned and said, “Nice try.”

“They’re from the VA. I need them,” I said.

“Naw. You won’t need this junk here. We’ll get you nice and healthy with good clean exercise.”

I also had a dozen bottles of Maalox the VA had given me for my constant heartburn. I’d gone in and told the shrink who I’d been seeing for a couple of years that I was going to jail and asked if she could give me a bunch of my Valium and Maalox. She’d said sure, and I had eight hundred pills with me. The guard said they’d send them home.

An hour later we stepped out the other side of the administration building as processed, numbered, blue-uniformed federal prisoners. John and I wore blue work clothes with pants that didn’t come within six inches of the ground, wearing work boots, carrying our stuff in grocery bags. A guard named Thompson, rotund and cherub-faced, led us down a sidewalk toward a low green building he said was Dorm Three. I heard the loud roar of a jet and turned to watch an F-16 fighter making a nearly vertical takeoff. The camp was about a mile from the main runway.

“Whatever you do, boys, be sure you are at your bunks during the count. Don’t fuck up.”

“When’s the count?” John said.

“They announce them on the loudspeakers. Everybody’s expected to be in their space. If you’re not, you’re in big trouble. Now, here in Dorm Three—everybody starts out in Dorm Three—you just got a bed. You’re expected to be standing at the foot of your bed during each count except the counts after lights out. At night, you’re allowed to be in your bed.”

Dorm Three was a low, old, and uneven frame building. “Everybody starts out here?” I said.

“Yeah. You live here for a few months and then they’ll assign you a cube in one of the other dorms.”

“A cube?” I said.

“Yeah. You’ll see. Four by seven feet, shoulder-high partitions, a bed and a chair.” Thompson shrugged. “Cube.”

Dorm Three was like an oven, the air hot and humid. The ceilings were low. The walls were green. The floors were waxed linoleum tile buffed to a brilliant shine. The long building was divided into four sections: A, B, C, and D. Thompson led us to section A and showed John his bed, the lower bunk of a bunk bed. Then he led me to section D and showed me mine. “Enjoy,” Thompson said as he left.

I stared at the bunk. This was time travel back to my days as a private in basic training. I knew what to do. There were about fifty men in the section. Mostly they ignored me as I started to make my bed. That’s what a nervous ex-Army person does when he sees an unmade bunk bed: you just naturally shake out the sheets and install hospital tucks and stretch the blankets so tight coins will bounce off.

As I finished, a voice blared from two speakers in the section. “Count time. Count time. All inmates report to your areas. Count time.” There were speakers in every section of each of the five dorms and about twenty more mounted on poles and buildings all over the twenty-eight-acre compound. The speakers would become an integral part of my life.

I stood by my bunk and watched my section fill up with inmates.

People were coming in from the porch outside. A man in his sixties nodded to me and stood at the foot of the bunk next to me. I said hello. He nodded and said hello. He said people called him Doc.

A couple of guys loitered by the door, on lookout for the hacks.

I asked a guy on the other side of me, a sturdy, thick man, why they called them hacks.

“I’m not sure why,” said the man. “Somebody told me it comes from what they call cabs. And whenever you go anywhere in a real prison—not this fucking place—you go with a guard. You take a hack. Sound right?”

“Sounds fine.”

“What’s your name?”

“Bob Mason.”

“Mine’s Don Barnett. You happen to be the writer?”

“I think so. I mean, I’m a writer.”

Barnett smiled and called across the isle. “Hey, Lauder, this is the guy.”

“What guy?” said a suntanned man about my age. He looked over at me.

“The guy who wrote that book you’re reading,” Don said.

Lauder smiled. “No shit?”

I nodded.

“Great book,” Lauder said. “I didn’t know shit about Vietnam. You made me think I was there.”

“Thanks,” I said, unsure of myself. I was not used to meeting people who’d read my book. They had the advantage of knowing a whole lot more about me than I knew about them. I revealed a lot about myself in Chickenhawk, and I figured somebody was going to use my candor against me. I mean, I actually admitted that I’d masturbated in Vietnam. I kept expecting to hear somebody call me a jerkoff.

“They’re coming!” the lookout said. He stepped back to his bunk.

We assumed count position. The man on the top bunk sat with his legs draped over the foot of his bed. The man on the lower bunk stood in the aisle.

Two hacks walked in the door and barked, “Count.” One stayed near the door and the other walked up the aisle nodding at each inmate, counting. When he’d walked up and down each side, he gave the number to the other guard. The guard checked his count sheet and nodded. The two hacks walked out the door to the porch and were gone.

The inmates crowded around the door, chattering like kids, making jokes. I asked Barnett what going on.

“We’re first for chow this week. It rotates among the dorms.” He looked at the eager mob by the door. “They’re going to race to the chow line. Not much happens here. This is a big deal.”

The speaker blared: “The count is clear. The count is clear. Dorm Three may proceed to dinner.”

The doors burst open and I watched the men scramble out on the porch and onto the sidewalks. I’d read part of my Admissions and Orientation Guide already. You could not run anywhere in camp except the jogging trail. You had to stay on the sidewalks. The men walked in the hip-swiveling gait of professional speed walkers, arms swinging, racing to the mess hall. I vowed I would never rush to dinner. I’d prefer starving to letting these people see me that eager for their food.

John came into my section. “Wanna go check out the place before we eat?”

We walked along the sidewalks of the prison. The five dormitories were grouped irregularly in an immaculately groomed landscape. Dorm Three was the worst-looking building in the camp. The other four dorms were single-story concrete buildings that looked like college dorms. Everything was neat and tidy. The hedges were flat as tables. Sidewalks were edged. There were no weeds. The grass was cropped as smooth as a carpet. We came to a service road that led in from the base and formed the eastern boundary of the camp. The service road looped around the buildings in the camp and exited at the west side. We walked south along it. Inmate joggers and speed walkers passed us. Just past the last dormitory, Dorm Five, was a wooded area, and just beyond it was a finger of water from Choctawhatchee Bay that came into the camp. We veered off the service road, following a woodsy path down to the white sandy beach. The water was dark and uninviting. We walked along the beach until we saw a guy named Jeff who’d checked in when we did. He was standing on the beach, staring at the water.

“Nice beach,” I said.

“Yeah, better’n no beach. But I’m from the Virgins.”

John and I nodded. We, the three newbies, looked over at the long line of inmates in front of the mess hall which was right in front of Dorm Five.

“Just like the Army,” I said. “Find a line and stand in it.” Two guys walking the path together rushed past us.

“I hear there’s some asshole big-deal writer showing up today,” Jeff said.

I smiled. “He’s here,” I said.

“Really? Where?”

“There,” John said, pointing to me.

“Really?” Jeff said, grinning. “Sorry.”

“Hey,” I said. “You got the asshole part right. I didn’t get where I am today by being smart.” Jeff laughed. I noticed a Huey flying just over the trees behind him. I felt a pang of embarrassment, imagining the pilot seeing me.

We decided to go eat and continue our tour later.

The mess hall was designed to feed five hundred inmates, the maximum this camp was supposed to hold. The population when John and I arrived was about six hundred and fifty. The result at the mess hall was longer waits and earlier opening of the serving line. Some inmates ate dinner before the four o’clock count.

The long line of inmates that formed outside against two walls of the building, under a metal awning, divided into two lines inside. The place looked like any civilian cafeteria. You got a tray from a stack, silverware (actual metal, as opposed to the plastic variety used in higher-level prisons), and plates. The first serving table held salads on a bed of crushed ice—tossed, gelatin, fruit, five-bean, and so on. Yes, I am talking about a prison. You scooted your tray along the rails and handed your plate to the servers. Our first meal was thin-sliced roast beef, mashed potatoes, spinach, and squash. As you continued along the serving line, you got your choice of Coke, coffee, iced tea, or milk with unlimited refills. We carried trays to an empty table and sat down.

“How’d you get here?” I asked Jeff.

“Stupidity.”

“Like?”

“Oh, I got wooed, you know?”

“Screwed?” John said.

“Same thing,” Jeff said, laughing. “These guys said all I had to do was to go buy a brand-new yacht in my name, make one delivery with it, and the boat was mine to keep. I couldn’t pass up a deal like that. Naturally, I got busted. Guess who’s the registered owner of the boat? Guess who takes the major rap? Five years.”

“Plus they took your boat,” John said.

Jeff nodded. “Plus they took my boat.”

“And you didn’t even get kissed,” I said, laughing. Jeff looked at me. I shrugged. “Sorry.”

We ate in a hurry. The food was okay, typical institutional fare. The problem with the mess hall was that it was pandemonium. The noise of two hundred men talking, laughing, clattering plates, clinking silverware, moving chairs, echoed and reverberated off the tile floors and concrete walls. You had to shout to be heard. John was sweating profusely, complaining how hot it was. It wasn’t hot. Every building in the camp, except Dorm Three, was air-conditioned.

Outside, we walked the rest of the jogging trail, a sandy path that ran along the boundary of the camp, beyond the dorms, and around a level grassy field big enough for a couple of football fields and a baseball diamond. We walked along the trail beside the western boundary of the camp, a white rope hung on short posts. Beyond the rope was a shallow ditch. Beyond the ditch was woods. To escape, just step over the rope.

The trail went past the weight shack, which was the busiest place in camp. Inside the open-walled building, thirty men lifted weights, punched punching bags, pedaled stationary bikes, and used all kinds of other exercise equipment. Around the weight shack were a couple of bocci lanes (at which four men on each lane rolled five-pound balls back and forth, seeing which team could get the most balls closest to the end of the lane); four tennis courts, which were always busy; and the softball field complete with bleachers—two sets of bleachers, one for inmates and one for the public. The prisoners were in the local softball league and played the Air Force units on the base. There was a baseball game going on as we walked by. We went past a low building that issued playing equipment, toward the administration building, back on the service road, completing one circuit of the jogging path.

The three of us stood at the entrance of the camp, staring at the white line painted across the road. Nobody said anything. That white line was the barrier. The physical thing that kept us here was a white line, painted over many times until it was as thick as two playing cards.

It seemed absurd that this system worked, but it did. The kind of prisoners sent here were just the kind who’d stay behind a white line if you told them to. You could not be sent to Eglin, or any of the other twenty or so camps in the United States like Eglin, if you were guilty of a violent crime, if weapons were used in the commission of your crime, or if your crime was a sex crime. Minimum-security camps were originally built to incarcerate white-collar criminals. Robert Haldeman of the Watergate era was sent here. The governor of Maryland was here the year before. Several wealthy businessmen were here now. Times change. Now the population was swelled by drug smugglers like us. Roughly seventy percent of the prisoners here were in for drug-related crimes, the rest were in for tax evasion or stock manipulation or union violations, or even any of several federal misdemeanors that can send you to prison. The white line worked because, if you stepped over it, you were guilty of escape and would be sent to a level two (or higher) prison, where they have actual, physical boundaries.

Floodlights atop tall poles flicked on, hazy cones surrounded by dusk. We continued down the service road and walked through the recreation room (pool and table tennis), the library (a living-room-sized place with few books), and the craft shop, which had a complete collection of woodworking equipment. We saw a big line of people going into a building next to the craft shop. We walked up to the door and saw that it was the camp commissary.

When we checked in, John and I had deposited a hundred dollars into our inmate commissary account. We were eager to spend some of it on essentials like soap and cigarettes. We got in line. After about a half hour, we got to the steps of the wooden porch at the front of the commissary building. A sign on the wall listed what you could buy and next to the sign was a box of order slips. You had to fill out the order slip before you got inside. The commissary was like a convenience store except you had to wait in line and clerks got the stuff for you. I studied the list. You could buy soap, soap dishes, combs, cigarettes, cigars, baby oil, soda, candy, shower shoes, towels, tennis balls, handballs, sweatshirts, T-shirts, fresh fruit, portable radios, watches, ice cream, and lots more. The list had a note attached that said special orders for tennis shoes, running shoes, baseball gloves and shoes, table tennis rackets, shorts, and tennis rackets were taken only at the commissary office between eleven and twelve, weekdays.

I decided to buy a watch. They’d taken my old Seiko when I checked in because they said it was too valuable. I’d bought it on my R&R in Hong Kong for five dollars, eighteen years before.

“Yeah,” John said. “Me, too. A watch, some Jif peanut butter, some Ritz crackers. Need a bunch of stuff.”

We filled out our lists and went inside. By the door was a counter closed off with a Plexiglas panel. You slipped your list through a slot. One of two inmates who worked there would grab it and start loading up a plastic bin with whatever you had on your list. They were both fast. They put your bin in a queue that they shoved along the counter until it stopped next to the cashier. The cashier was Miss Reed, a nice-looking blond woman who ran the commissary. They called her Lady-hack. She looked like most any other clerk you’ve seen in a convenience store except that she was attractive even wearing the blue Bureau of Prisons uniform. Miss Reed pulled inmate account cards from a portable file drawer and put them in her register. She totaled up the order as the other inmate clerk shoved the stuff through a hole. Bananas and socks and soap tumbled down a chute for the inmate customer to bag. The purchase amount was deducted from the account card. Miss Reed looked for John’s account card and shook her head. One of the inmates, called Grumbles because of his gravelly voice, said, “You don’t have an account yet.”

“What d’you mean?” John said. “I gave them a hundred bucks. Cash.”

Grumbles shrugged knowingly. “I’m sure. But the assholes haven’t made you an account card yet. You’ll have one by Monday. Try then.” Grumbles turned around with John’s bin and restocked the stuff in it in about ten seconds. I told him I was in the same boat, and we walked outside.

On the way, we passed the camp chapel. Inside, we saw men singing. A choir of prisoners. The chapel was a refuge for many, and I think it was good that they provided one. In keeping with the cynical spirit of prison, people who did not go to chapel called those that did “kneel and squealers.”

We were back at our bunks for the ten o’clock count.

I sat on my bunk after the count and just watched. I was feeling sad.

At forty-one, I was feeling the same homesickness I’d felt as a teenage college student away from home the first time. I was a stranger in a strange place. Doc, the man next to me, was reading the Bible. Doc had told me earlier that he was a physician (family practice). Doc believed that the federal income tax was unconstitutional. Protesting this illegal tax, Doc didn’t pay his for several years. He got two years, proving that having a medical degree doesn’t necessarily mean a person is smart.

Barnett, the guy in the bunk above me, was telling an inmate how to appeal his case. Barnett was an attorney from Atlanta. Jailhouse lawyers, I am told, are common. At Eglin, though, most of them were actually attorneys. Across the aisle, Lauder was reading my book. I nodded at a wild-looking man next to Lauder who was staring at me. He had hollow eyes, long stringy black hair, and looked about fifty pounds underweight. He nodded back and came over to my bunk. He sat on Doc’s bed, ignoring Doc. Doc glanced up, made a small sneer, and looked back to his Bible.

“You wrote that book?” the rangy-looking inmate asked.

“Yeah. I did.”

“That’s great,” he said. He smiled. “My name’s Fred. Fred Devito.”

“Bob Mason. Pleased to meet you, Fred.”

“I’m trying to teach myself how to write. You know, learn something useful while I’m here besides how to spear trash.”

“That’s great,” I said. “That’s your job? Spearing trash?”

Devito nodded. “That’s what they’ve got me doing now, during this two-week A&O (admissions and orientation) bullshit. I walk around with a bucket and a stick with a nail on the end. I pick up cigarette butts and stuff all day. Not a bad job, really. You’d be smart if you could get it tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?”

“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.

The visiting room was actually two large rooms that made an L-shaped building next to the administration building. The open sides of the L were walled off, making the visiting area a separate compound from the rest of the camp.

Wives and families lined up and waited outside until the place opened at eight. Then they brought in picnic baskets and books and kids and toys and gathered together chairs and tables inside the rooms and out in the yard, establishing small enclaves where they could visit with their men. Most people stayed until closing at three. In the yard outside, inmates dressed in their blue prison uniforms sat around circular concrete picnic tables talking to their gaily dressed wives. Children played tag.

Guards watched to see that the rules against physical contact were enforced. You were allowed to kiss upon meeting and upon departure. Holding hands, as long as they were in view, was permissible. When a hack told me that having a hole in your pocket was against the rules, I had to ask. “We got guys who’ll let their wives play with them through their pockets,” said the hack. His disgust reminded me of a schoolteacher who told us to ignore whatever it was the monkeys were doing during a trip to the zoo.

Some inmates and their wives strolled together around a short walkway that meandered through the yard. Against the farthest wall from the visiting rooms was a sandy play area filled with kids who played on seesaws and spring-mounted rocking horses. With all the blue uniforms mixed with bright civilian clothing, it looked like a weekend picnic for a bunch of gas-station attendants.

Patience and Alice had set up a table inside where it was cool. Patience brought some coffee and doughnuts and yogurt. We hugged and kissed under the watchful eyes of the hacks and sat down.

“I love you,” Patience said.

I winced.

“What? You don’t think I should love you now?”

“No.”

“Just because you’re a convict?”

“That’s a pretty good reason, don’t you think?”

“Maybe if you’d killed somebody, or robbed a bank at gunpoint. Maybe then I’d have trouble.”

“We have at least two more years of this, Patience. It’s going to get old fast.”

Patience looked at me carefully. “I love you,” she said.

Before I finished my coffee, I heard my name called. I went to the hacks at their desk near the entrance.

“I’m Mason,” I said.

“They want you at control,” said a hack known as Rocky. Rocky was a three-tour Marine Vietnam vet who, I later learned from him, thought guard duty at Eglin was about the pussiest job he could imagine. He was surly to inmates, with the amiable fierceness of a drill sergeant.

“What’s the deal?”

“Deal?” Rocky said. “The deal is you get your ass up to control. That’s the deal.” Rocky made me miss the Army.

I went outside and walked to control. I went up to the window on the side of the glass booth and told them I was here. The hack nodded, motioned to come around the other side to the door. I walked around and went inside.

“What are you doing in here, inmate?” the hack said.

“You just told me to come in here.”

“Wiseass, eh? What’s your name?”

“Mason.”

“What’s your number?”

“Eight-one-three-four-nine-dash-oh-seven-one-ay.”

The hack nodded and said, “Wait right there.”

I stood against the wall in the hallway. Hacks passed me like I was wallpaper. In a minute I saw the photographer from People magazine walking toward me with Superintendent Honsted.

“Hey, Lynn, how you been?” I said. I remembered his name because while he’d been photographing me at home, we had talked about photography: the kind of film he used, the cameras he liked best, and so on.

“Fine, Bob. They treating you okay?”

I looked at Honsted. “Here? It’s like staying at a resort, Lynn. Great place.”

Lynn smiled and asked Honsted if there were any restrictions for the photography session.

“No. Not as long as I’m with you. I suggest we go outside. You can start out there.”

I posed next to the big sign out front. I had to cross the white line to get to it, but I had Honsted’s permission. Next we walked to Dorm Three. The other A&O guys were mopping floors and scrubbing the latrine. Jeff looked up from his mopping, shook his head, and smiled. The inmates watched me, their faces filled with curiosity. An inmate, the warden, and a photographer are walking around here? Who’s that guy?

Lynn photographed me standing by my bunk and then we went out on the porch. He had me sit on one of the benches and mug for the camera while he ran off a roll. I stood up and leaned against the porch railing for another roll. While he took pictures, I watched the other inmates staring. In that few minutes, half the camp finally knew exactly who the asshole, big-deal writer was.

By three o’clock, I was ready to snap from aggravation. I hated the visiting room. I hated being a prisoner, but that wasn’t why I was so pissed. I deserved humiliation, but having Patience subjected to it made it much worse. I was selfish. I wanted isolation to sulk, to forget where I was. Visitors from the outside, even Patience, reminded me that I was inside.

We hugged by the door. I gave Patience the one legal kiss I was allowed and we said good-bye. She promised she’d be back the next day. I smiled, trying to suppress my disappointment. “You want to see me, don’t you?”

“Yes. You know I do.”

I watched her walk with Alice out to the parking lot.

When the visitors were gone and the inmates were gone, the A&O inmates remained. The hacks left when inmate Harris arrived. Harris, a greasy guy with broken teeth, hurried around the place, earnestly pulling buckets and mops and brooms out of closets. “We got to clean this place up before the four o’clock count,” Harris said seriously. “If we don’t, we got to come back and do it tonight.”

John and I were assigned to police the visiting yard. I had wondered who was going to pick up the few thousand cigarette butts I’d noticed collecting on the ground; now I knew. We hauled plastic garbage bags around and filled them with drink cans, Styrofoam cups, half-eaten sandwiches, cigars, and even a few disposable diapers. In half an hour, we had cleaned up the trash. Harris then had us hook up water hoses and wash down everything. I was beginning to understand just why this prison always looked so spotless. It’s the kind of thing you just take for granted.

The fifteen A&O inmates made the place as shiny as new: floors mopped and buffed, tables and chairs wiped and set back in place, bathrooms scrubbed, coffee urn washed, all trash in trash cans, and the whole yard washed down—all with five minutes to spare. Harris thanked us distractedly as he carefully inspected our work before letting us go to our dorm. Harris, a former bureaucrat from Jacksonville, had totally focused his mind on the condition of his visiting room. He had escaped.

Count.

Watch the race to the mess hall.

John and I and Jeff walked around the camp, trying to find people we might know who lived in the regular dorms. John and I were especially looking for somebody who’d lend us some cigarettes until the commissary opened Monday. We were both going to quit smoking, we said, but the time wasn’t yet right.

Because of the People photography session, a lot of guys stopped me and said they’d heard about my book, or heard me on the radio, or read about me. By this time, nearly every major newspaper in America had reviewed Chickenhawk or reprinted the New York Times piece. When we met an older guy who’d read my book, I noticed he had a couple of cartons of cigarettes in his locker; I asked him if he’d lend me one. He was pleased to. Proud to.

Amazing, isn’t it? Even as a convict, I was living proof that you could take five dollars’ worth of paper and turn it into a book. Chickenhawk wasn’t yet an official best-seller, and I wasn’t making tons of money. At the moment, though, my fame was worth a carton of cigarettes.

The Sunday visit was worse than Saturday’s and I wondered how I was going to tell Patience I wanted to see her less than the every-other-week visiting schedule she said she’d maintain.

CHAPTER 25

Monday I woke to see everybody bustling around getting dressed and rushing off to breakfast. During the weekend, breakfast was served at ten. During the regular weekday routine, the kitchen opened at five-thirty. At six-thirty, the loudspeaker blared, “Work call. Work call,” and the inmates who worked on the Air Force base gathered at their checkpoints at the entrance to the camp. They were met out front by their Air Force bosses, usually young technical sergeants, and driven off to work. Some inmates—the phone repair people and others—actually had their own Air Force trucks parked in the parking lot which they jumped into and drove to work. I was witnessing a workday at Eglin.

At seven, all the A&O inmates were called to the visiting room.

Superintendent Honsted welcomed us to Eglin. He was a good-looking guy, and considered very fair. He said he was approachable if we saw him walking around the camp, but the best way to get our needs known was to go through the chain of command. The camp was divided into two units, north and south. Each unit had a unit manager. Each unit was further divided into six teams. Each team was comprised of a case manager, a counselor, and a secretary. These teams had offices where we applied for furloughs, job changes, and relief from whatever grief we wanted to complain about. The forms used for these various requests were called “cop-outs.” He finished with: “You may be surprised to know that the Bureau of Prisons does not consider your stay here, in any way, as rehabilitation.” Honsted waited to let that sink in. “It is the common belief, mostly from movies, that the state is trying to somehow rehabilitate its criminals. The Bureau of Prisons considers that you are here to be punished. Plain and simple. If you want to further your education, learn a trade or something; these things are possible, but whether you do them or not is your responsibility. Not ours.”

The warden left and the assistant warden, younger and not nearly as friendly as the warden, lectured us on the various rules of the camp. He said that Eglin was created in 1962 under a maintenance contract with the Air Force. That’s what we’d be, most of us, contract laborers working for between eleven and thirty-four cents an hour. The Air Force paid the prison camp minimum wages ($3.25 an hour) for our time, which helped make the camp self-sufficient. It only cost taxpayers half what it would cost to put us behind bars. We’d read that in our pamphlets. What we wanted to know about was the furloughs.

“You are eligible for your first furlough, a one-day pass in the local area, when you’ve been here at least six months and you’re within two years of release, assuming you have no points against you and if your counselors recommend it,” said the assistant warden. “Within eighteen months of release, you’re eligible for an overnight furlough in the local area. Every six months after that, you are eligible for a five-day furlough to your home community. These furloughs are not automatic; they are granted to help an inmate keep his family together and to help his transition back into society as he gets near the end of his sentence. They must be applied for, your family has to request your visits, and each request has to be reviewed before it is granted.”

“Does anybody ever not get a furlough?” asked an inmate.

“Almost everybody gets their furloughs. We weed out real troublemakers and send them to higher-level prisons,” said the assistant warden. “Like Superintendent Honsted said, you’re here to be punished, but we realize that it’s to everybody’s benefit that you have some opportunity to readjust to normal society.”

After that, a man called Coach told us about the athletic program; the director of education told us how we were going to be tested, screened for job suitability and educational level. All prisoners would work every day, all day, except those not having a high-school diploma or those who didn’t demonstrate a high-school level of competence. They would have to attend the camp’s school in the mornings and work in the afternoons. He said also that it was possible to take courses at the local community college. We heard from the food service director, the finance manager, and the chaplain. Lady-hack, Miss Reed, told us how the commissary worked.

By ten, we’d heard from most of the people who ran the camp. The director of education, Mr. Gossen, said that the following morning we’d begin the testing. Now we were excused to go have lunch. After lunch, we would report to Dorm Two and get our work assignments.

During lunch I talked to some inmates who’d been in camp for a year. They said that while we were in A&O, the counselors and hacks would be deciding what our permanent jobs would be from the forms we filled out. They never let doctors work at the clinic, or dentists assist the dentist, or lawyers work in the business offices. Usually, however, they assigned plumbers and carpenters, phone installers, mechanics, machinists, and air-conditioning men to their respective trades. I had a useful trade for a prison career: I could type. I figured I might be able to get a job as a clerk or as a teacher’s assistant at the school. Either one would give me access to a typewriter.

That afternoon, Tarzan assigned me to landscape detail, known as “Iandscrape” in camp. I hung around the landscape shed in the shade of an oak tree. The shed was next to the service road that looped around the south end of the camp, and about twenty inmates were sitting in the sweltering heat waiting for Officer Simpson, the hack in charge of landscape. His regular team of a dozen inmates were there, including Barnett, along with about ten temporaries like me from the A&O gang.

“How come they got you on landscape?” I asked Barnett.

“I’m a troublemaker, Mason. This is where they put us.”

“I’d go nuts,” I said.

“It’s not so bad,” Barnett said. “It’ll get you in shape. It’s like working in your yard except you do it every day, seven to three.”

Officer Simpson showed up driving his blue pickup truck. He stood on the tarmac, pushed his baseball cap back revealing a sweaty brow, and began calling off names from his clipboard. Everyone was present. Simpson ambled toward the door to the shed and walked inside.

The shed was packed with riding mowers, mulchers, push mowers, gasoline-powered blowers, rakes, shovels, edgers, and big push brooms. “Okay, Taylor,” Simpson said to an inmate. “You and Barnett will be in charge of the edging team today. We’re going to the village.” The village was a group of houses near the camp in which many of the hacks lived. The inmates mowed the yards and trimmed the hedges there, too. Barnett and Taylor nodded and began loading Simpson’s truck. Simpson then called off names and assigned inmates to a trench-digging team, a gravel-spreading team, and a sod-planting team. The regulars marched off toward the dorms carrying buckets and rakes and brooms. I saw Devito, the man from my section, and two other guys headed off carrying buckets and trash spears. A tall Cuban named Fredrico was in charge of all the hedges on camp and had an assistant who helped him. They used taut strings and long thin boards as guides to keep the hedges perfectly flat and square. Other inmates cranked up their riding mowers and chugged off to mow the camp. I heard my name called. “Mason, you take a hand mower up between Dorm One and the visiting room and mow that section,” Simpson said. He was pointing to a lawn mower. I nodded.

The mower was a power mower, but it had to be pushed. I pushed it to the other end of the camp and cranked it up. The sun beat down so hard that my shirt was soaked before I’d pushed the mower one lap around the section. By the time I got the first piece finished, I was feeling faint. I wasn’t used to working in the sun. Hell, I wasn’t used to physical labor at all.

It took about an hour to mow the area Simpson had assigned me. I pushed the mower back to the shed, weak, seeing stars, drenched with sweat. Back at the shed, Simpson was gone, out with Barnett’s team at the village. An inmate whose job it was to sit at Simpson’s desk and answer the phone and to check equipment in and out told me to wash the mower off and put it back with the others. I washed the mower with a hose and parked it.

Simpson’s clerk said, “Simpson wants you to trim around the posts and crap at the recreation building, Mason. You’ll need a bucket and some shears.”

Most of the buildings at Eglin had little white posts and white rope fences around them. When they mowed around the posts with the riding mowers, tufts of grass stayed. There were about fifty posts around the building. I started out front and worked around back, pulling the grass out by the roots next to the posts and trimming the small swatches the mowers missed with the shears. I put the grass trimmings into the bucket. By two in the afternoon, I was behind the recreation building, across the service road from the building called the clothing room. I was sitting by a post pulling grass when Grumbles, the commissary guy, who was sitting in the shade of the laundry room overhang, yelled, “Hey Mason, how does it feel? One day you’re a famous writer, the next day you’re a fucking landscrape artist!” A few guys sitting with Grumbles laughed. I looked up and smiled.

“Life’s like that,” I said.

Simpson drove by in the landscape truck with Barnett and Taylor and three other inmates in the back. He stopped beside me. “Better get your tools together, Mason. We’re about ready to pack it up.”

I nodded and Simpson drove down the service road.

I was walking along the posts next to the sidewalk carrying my plastic bucket and my shears when the warden came around the corner from behind the recreation building. He walked up to me. “How you like it so far, Mason?”

“Swell,” I said. “I think I’d be better as a clerk, though. I’m a very good typist.”

Honsted smiled and shook his head. “No writers around typewriters,” he said.

I nodded. We’ll see.

The warden looked up toward the clothing room. I looked. The inmates that’d been loitering out front had disappeared. The warden smiled and said, “You know, Mason, I’ve noticed something interesting when I read your personal history sheet. You and I are the same age.”

He was dressed in a crisp white shirt, a tie, pressed slacks, and loafers. He was smiling. I was dressed in high-water blue pants, a blue shirt, both drenched with sweat, and wore a pair of stiff boots, the tattered insides of which I was afraid to explore with my hand for fear of something biting me. I was smiling, too. I nodded. “Pretty ironic, all right,” I said.

After the four o’clock count, I went to the clothing room to see about getting some different boots. There was a complaint window just off the service road. I got in line behind two inmates. A white-haired old man was inside the window. The guy in front of the line called him Deacon and was saying that his pants were worn out. Deacon said, “They look fine to me. What do you think this is? A fucking resort?” He looked past the inmate and said, “Next.”

“Hey,” the inmate said. “What about my pants? I work in an office, and they want me to have nice-looking clothes.”

“If you don’t like your pants, fill out a cop-out and get your counselor to authorize an exchange because you need new pants for your job.”

“You crazy? My counselor? That’ll take forever. Why can’t you just hand me another pair, Deacon? You got hundreds of pants in there,” the inmate said, pointing behind Deacon to the floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with clothing.

“You heard me,” Deacon said. “Next.”

“You prick. You act like you own this shit,” the inmate said, walking past me, his face burning with anger.

The next inmate held up a pair of underwear with a dozen holes peppering the seat. “You have some kind of flatulance problem?” Deacon said.

“No, Deacon, these are worn out,” the inmate said, smiling, intimidated.

Deacon nodded, tossed the underwear into a bin inside, and yelled, “John. Give me a pair of Jockeys, medium. Stamp’em three-ninety-seven.”

Inside, I saw John, a tall blond guy, grab a pair of new underwear off a shelf, break open the package, and put them in a stamping machine. John limped when he walked. Most of the people in the clothing room were either old or handicapped. He set the number on the machine and hit a switch. The inmate’s laundry number was impressed in black characters on the waistband of the Jockeys. John gave them to Deacon.

“Here you go,” Deacon said, tossing the underwear to the inmate.

He looked at me and said, “Next.”

“Hi,” I said. “Deacon?”

“Yeah?”

I stood back a little and held up my foot. “These fucking boots were worn out a couple of years ago. Really hurt my feet.”

“Yeah?” Deacon said, looking at me carefully. “You the new guy? The writer?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. I figured I was looking at a favor coming up, considering I was a celebrity and all.

“This is prison, Mason.”

“Really?” I said. “This is prison? I know it’s prison. So what? I see people wearing new boots around here.”

“You haven’t been here long enough for new boots. Next.”

“Are you kidding?” I said.

An inmate behind me said, “C’mon, man, I’m late for chow. Deacon doesn’t kid.”

I got out of line and stood by the door to the clothing room, seething. Deacon’d been here so long he figured he owned the clothes. I watched the traffic in and out of the clothing room, trying to understand how it worked. Somewhere in there, they had boots. New boots.

Inmates waited in line and walked in a door and up to a counter and called out their clothing number. Other inmates inside, one of them the old guy from my dorm, Doc, would go to one of the hundreds of bins behind them and get the inmate’s laundry. Then the inmate walked out the other door. I saw another door at the far end of the building. I walked to it and peeked in through the screen. I heard the chatter of a sewing machine. I went inside and saw a guy working on a sewing machine in a closet-sized room. The bottom half of a Dutch door with a shelf on top was closed across the doorway. I leaned on the shelf and said, “Hi.”

The guy looked up from his work. “Hi. Need some alterations?” he said with a strong accent. Sounded English to me.

“No. That’s what you do?”

“That’s right, mate.”

“You British?”

“Me, mate? No way. I’m Australian.”

I grinned. Seemed funny to me. “What—”

“Got caught at sea, mate. Your Coast Guard nabbed us in international waters and towed us back.”

“Tough break,” I said.

The man shrugged. “Better jail here than in Australia, mate.”

“Why’s that?”

“They take a sterner view of this drug-smuggling business than your blokes do. I got five years here. I’ll serve maybe two. In Australia I’d have gotten ten and served ten.”

“Man,” I said. “That’s tough.” I looked at the sewing machine.

“You knew how to operate that before you got here? Ah—” I said, prompting him for his name with raised eyebrows.

“Tom. Tom Carpenter,” he said. “I was a sailmaker on the outside. You?”

“I was a writer.”

“Oh. You’re the bloke they been saying was showing up. Robert Mason, right?”

“Bob.”

“Bob, then. I’m reading your book right now, Bob. Nice job, that. You know a lot of our boys were there, too.”

“I know. I met some Australian pilots over there. I remember they used to carry change purses made from kangaroo scrotums.”

Tom nodded. “Yep. That’s them, all right. What do you need, Bob? Something altered?”

“No. I was trying to find out who’s in charge of boots.”

“Boots?” Tom jutted out his chin. “Right behind you, Bob. That old fart in there, Timmy. He’s the bloke you want.”

I turned. Across the hall from Tom’s alteration room was another doorway. I walked to it and saw an old man inside holding a shoe up against a buffing machine, his back to me. I stepped inside. When the man turned around to set the shoe on his work counter, he saw me. “Yeah?”

“You Timmy?”

“Yeah.”

“I hear you’re in charge of boots and shoes here.”

“Yeah.”

I pointed to my boots. “These things are beyond fixing,” I said.

Timmy looked down at my boots and grinned. “That’s the shit they issue to the new guys. You’re supposed to go through the exchange window to get new ones. You try getting Deacon to exchange ’em for you?”

“Yeah. He told me this is prison.”

“That old fart’s acting more like a hack every day. He’s been here almost five years, and I don’t think he’ll leave when he’s free. If he does, he’ll probably open his own fucking jail. Prick.” Timmy looked at my boots again. “Elevens, right?”

“Right.”

Timmy stepped into a small storeroom and came back with a brand-new pair of work boots, size eleven. “Here you go. The least a body should have around here is some boots that are fit to wear.”

I sat on a wooden stool and changed boots. “You work on shoes on the outside?” I said as I laced up the new boots.

“I used to own a shoe shop,” Timmy said.

“How’d you get here, owning a shoe shop?”

“Shoes had nothing to do with it. I got stupid and agreed to fly a fucking DC-6 load of pot from Colombia.”

“DC-6?” I looked at Timmy skeptically. He looked at least sixty-five. He was gray-headed and stoop-shouldered, the least likely looking pilot I’d ever seen.

“Yeah, used to fly ’em for the airlines. I retired ten years ago, opened up my shoe store with my brother. We were doing fine. Not getting rich, you know? But a good living. Greed got me. Some kids asked me did I want to make a hundred thousand on one flight. Said they owned a DC-6, heard I used to fly ’em.”

I tightened up the laces and tied them off. I stood up and walked around experimentally. “How they feel?” Timmy asked.

“Great. So how’d you get caught?”

“It was an old plane, most of the instruments were broken,” Timmy said. “Got caught in the soup and couldn’t find the damn cow pasture where they wanted the stuff. When I got low on fuel, I just flew the fucker to the nearest airport and landed. Damn near made it, too.” Timmy grinned at the memory. “But they were watching the airport, Customs guys. Came aboard.”

I nodded. “I know what that feels like,” I said, standing on tiptoe to stretch the new boots. They fit perfectly, a little stiff from the newness. “Well, thanks, Timmy. These are great. Any time you want a favor, let me know.”

“I don’t care nothing about favors. There’s nothing in this camp I want except to get out of it.”

I was lying on my bunk after I’d showered, watching life in Dorm Three. A Cuban across from me coughed so hard I thought I’d see chunks of lungs coming up any second. When he finished hacking, he looked up, blinked, wiped his mouth, shook his head like a fighter who’d taken a hard punch, and lit up another cigarette. It was disgusting. I pulled my pack of Winstons out and tapped out a cigarette and lit it. I was going to quit, but I hadn’t gotten to it yet.

Barnett’s feet dangled off the edge of the bunk above me, and then he jumped down to the floor. He leaned over and said, “You read much?”

“Some,” I said.

“Here,” he said, holding a mail-order book catalog toward me.

I took the catalog. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” Barnett said, walking away.

I opened the catalog and heard, “Mason? You Mason?” An inmate on crutches swung across the waxed tile floor, his crutch tips squeaking and chirping. His left leg was in a cast from his ankle to above his knee.

“Yeah,” I said. “What about it?”

“I’m a Huey pilot, too, that’s what about it!” The inmate laughed and sat down on Doc’s bed.

“No shit?”

“No shit, brother. Jack Cantrell,” he said, holding out his hand. “There’s at least three of us here.”

I shook his hand. “Three of us? Three Huey pilots?”

“That’s a fact. Above the best!” Jack Cantrell yelled the Army Aviator’s motto.

“All right!” I said. “Pleased to meet you, Jack. Who were you with?”

“Flew guns with the Americal.” He immediately rolled up his pants leg and showed me gnarled scars on his good leg. “Got raked in my cockpit, Bob.” He rubbed the puckered skin around his knee and shin. He crossed his arms, raised his sweatshirt, and showed me a pencil-thick half-inch-deep indentation in his chest. “A fucking tracer came through my chicken plate just far enough to stick into my chest. Sat there and burned into me.” He let his shirt drop and rolled his pants leg down. “You?”

“You make me feel bad, Jack. I just wrote a book about my tour, and the worst I got was the clap.”

“Hey,” he said, laughing. “Lucky for you. I don’t mind. I’m glad you wrote it. People need to know what it was like over there.”

I made a face that dismissed the compliment and shook my head. “What’s the cast for?”

Jack laughed. “Would you believe it? Baseball? Broke it sliding into third base last week. And I’m due to leave yesterday!”

“Yesterday. You serious?”

“Like a fucking heart attack. They won’t let me go until it’s healed. You believe it? I ask them what the fuck difference it makes if I go home with a cast. They say they’re responsible for my health here, and I’m not well. Can’t leave prison if you’re sick. Bastards. They’re lifers here, every one of them. I told one of my hack buddies that when I’m out of here, I’ll be thinking of him every day. I said, ‘I’m gonna spend a minute each day, take a whole minute off, just to think about this place. And I’m gonna laugh my ass off, old buddy, ‘cause you’ll still be here.’”

We talked for an hour. Jack talked about flying Hueys with infectious enthusiasm. I realized I missed them, too, missed the tough missions, the tricky flying we had to do to survive. He told me about the day he was wounded. He was flying low-level down Route 19, a road I knew, and got caught in an ambush. Two machine guns raked his cockpit, shattered his shins and knees. His copilot was killed.

Jack knew all about flying Hueys in combat. He also knew the ins and outs of Eglin. I told him I wanted to work at the school. He said that was smart. Teacher’s assistant was a piece of cake. He told me the name of a guy to go see, the same procedure we used in the Army. Everything worth doing in the Army was done outside the usual channels, through the clerks and technicians, the people who actually did the work. If you needed new boots, you made friends with the supply sergeant with a bottle of whiskey. If you wanted a leave request approved, you walked it through the chain of command’s clerks in a day. If you waited for official Army channels to process a request, you’d have gray hair first. I figured Jack was a good contact.

I settled into life at Dorm Three. I didn’t see John Tillerman much. He was in a different section, and we never got assigned to the same work details. I talked to the inmate Jack Cantrell had suggested. He explained that I was a hot property in camp, and wouldn’t have any trouble getting the job I wanted in the school. That was a relief; landscape was getting hard. We’d finished the morning talks and testing, so we worked all day. I mowed, weeded, dug—it’s not that I didn’t like this kind of work, I just didn’t like doing it all the time. I talked to the education director, Mr. Gossen, in front of the education building while I was pulling up weeds. My inmate connection had told him I wanted to be a teacher’s assistant. He said he had arranged everything.

After mail call, Barnett showed me a copy of People magazine, the September twelfth issue, with a picture of Chevy Chase on the cover.

“Yeah?” I said.

Barnett flipped it open. “Looky here. You’re in trouble,” he said, grinning.

It was a picture of me looking pissed off, standing on the porch of Dorm Three. The section was entitled trouble and the headline said: AUTHOR ROBERT MASON, JAILED FOR DRUG RUNNING, WATCHES HIS LITERARY TRIUMPH, Chickenhawk, FLY THE COOP. The headline didn’t make much sense, but Chandler’s two-page article was pretty accurate. It was a strange feeling to see me and Patience and Jack in People magazine.

I called Gerry Howard in New York the next day. He told me to call every Friday to find out how the book was doing. Phones were scattered all over the camp. The permanent dorms had one pay phone at each end, some inside and some outside. Dorm Three had phone booths on the porches on each side of the dorm. To make a call, you roamed the camp or sat in line. I called Gerry, collect, during lunch.

“To date…” Gerry paused; I could hear some paper shuffling. “Let’s see. Oh, yeah. We’ve sold twenty thousand books.” Gerry paused again. I felt a jolt of surprise. I heard Gerry laugh and then say, “Kind of beats the hell out of our prediction of five thousand, eh?”

I laughed. “Twenty thousand?”

“Yep. And we’re selling an average of a thousand a day. A day.”

I walked back to work, dazed. While I helped unload gravel from a pickup truck that we were spreading over a drainage field we’d dug, I multiplied twenty thousand times $2.50, the royalty I got for each book. It came to fifty thousand dollars no matter how often I figured it, but that couldn’t be right. I’d never dreamed I’d get that much money for the book. Fifty thousand and growing? Gerry said we were selling a thousand a day? That meant while I was here, in jail, shoveling this gravel, I was making twenty-five hundred dollars a day? I couldn’t help it, I grinned.

I started chattering with Kurt Vierthaller, another of the A&O guys. I was bubbling over with joy and took to laughing and horsing around with Kurt, knocking the gravel off his shovel and stuff. Simpson came up behind me and said, “This isn’t a fucking lark. Mason. This is prison.” I turned around and saw Simpson glaring at me. I nodded. Simpson was telling the truth. I threw a shovelful of gravel into the drainage field, but I was laughing inside.

I heard an inmate in the hall yell to someone that our permanent work assignments were posted on the bulletin board. I breezed down the hall toward the mob crowded in front of the bulletin board next to the bathroom door. The other A&O guys were pressed around the board, reading their assignments. I heard bitching and moaning. I smiled smugly. If you had your act together, like I did, you didn’t have to depend on luck. Smart people make their own luck, suckers. I stood behind the crowd and lit a cigarette. As the inmates thinned out, I moved closer to the board. I read “Mason, Robert, 81349-071 A” in the name column and followed the little dots across from it to the job column. I read “Landscape.”

I traced the dots across the page with my finger. It was landscape, no mistake.

I went to the education building and found Mr. Gossen sitting in his office. He waved me in. “What happened?” I asked.

“The superintendent. He approves all the job assignments, Bob. The staff does the picking. His signature is just a formality. But this time he was looking for yours. He saw you assigned here and denied it.”

“Is there any recourse? Can I do anything?”

Mr. Gossen shook his head. “Not really. You can go through your counselor. If you can prove your job is bad for your health or something, they can get your job changed. You have a health problem?”

“Not unless you count going fucking nuts when I see a rake.”

Mr. Gossen smiled. “I’m sorry, Bob. We were looking forward to having you around here. Bob Haldeman used to work here.”

“The Watergate Haldeman?”

“Yeah. He wrote a book. I thought it’d be nice to have had you here, too.”

CHAPTER 26

Dorm Four is mine. I am supposed to keep every blade of grass and every leaf and every lump of dirt around Dorm Four cut, arranged, and smoothed to perfection. I have tools: a bucket, a stiff push broom, a springy leaf rake, a sharp edging tool with a new hickory handle, a nice new snippy pair of shears, and—that’s it.

I start in the morning by emptying all the butt buckets at each of the four entrances. There are cigarette and cigar butts in the sand in each butt bucket and all around each butt bucket. There are wads of stuff people who chew tobacco spit into the butt buckets, gelatinous and brown. People who use tobacco are pigs.

I curl up a piece of cardboard to scoop the sticky messes out of the sand. I make a swirl design in the sand of each butt bucket when I am finished, like you see in posh hotels. Next, I sweep two hundred yards of sidewalks and patios around Dorm Four with my broom and gather together hundreds more cigarette butts. I put all this into my bucket.

The grass is freshly mowed, so all I have to do is manicure the shrubbery beds on all four sides of the building. The beds are dirt extending eight feet from the walls. In this dirt are various kinds of plants. Some are grouped together as hedges, which I trim flat and square with my shears. Some are individual plants which I trim to shape with the care of a sculptor and from whose interiors I pluck unsightly dead leaves. The lawn attempts to intrude into these dirt beds and has to be trimmed to a definite, knife-edged boundary. I shove the edger blade through snakes of Bermuda grass shoots which are infiltrating my pristine dirt beds. When I have finished edging the grass, it is ten, time to get ready for lunch.

At eleven-thirty, I am back at my post. It is now very hot. I thought it was hot earlier, but I was wrong. It is hot now. Panhandle Florida in August and September is hot and humid enough to bake bread.

All the twigs and leaves and grass clippings I’ve trimmed are now lying, in horrible disarray, in the plant beds. I rake every inch of the dirt, leaving careful parallel marks in the sand running smartly, perpendicularly, from the walls to the grass.

Then—I’m finished? I check my new Casio watch I bought at the commissary. It’s only two o’clock. Simpson works us until three. I see Simpson driving toward me on the service road. I put my rake on my shoulder and go fetch my bucket while Simpson drives by. He nods to let me know I’m doing okay. Of course I’m doing okay. I’m good at this stuff.

I’m sensitive to the proper order of grass and leaves and twigs and dirt; Dorm Four will look like a Zen garden someday.

I notice that my predecessor, an aesthetic dullard, has let the grass grow up wildly around each and every one of the hundreds of white-painted stones that line the border of the service road and my grass. I begin working to correct the problem.

At two-thirty, I see others of the Eglin landscrape corps ambling back to the landscrape shed, known to our proud few as “the shop.” I stand up and review my progress. I have gotten a dozen rocks looking up to snuff. I fetch my rake and broom and shears and edger and my five-gallon plastic bucket and walk to the shop.

I wash off my tools and put them back on the racks. A couple of new A&O guys look bewildered and lost and I point out where the stuff they’re carrying is supposed to go. Outside, I sit on a low rock wall under the big oak, next to Barnett, and light up a Winston.

“Whatcha think?” says Barnett.

“I think I will be nuts very soon.”

Barnett laughs. “You don’t like this? Hey, Bob, this is back to the land, close to nature. Fresh air, exercise—”

“I hate nature,” I said. “It makes me sneeze. You know what else I hate?”

Barnett is laughing and doesn’t answer.

“I hate grass because it never stops trying to fuck up my shrubbery beds. I hate it when that happens.”

“You’re really getting into this,” Bamett says.

“Yes. I am. But it’s not all bad. I think I’ve made a scientific discovery about that slimy brown stuff you see in the butt buckets—you know what I’m talking about?”

Bamett can’t talk. This kind of humor gets to him.

“That stuff, as slimy and revolting as it looks—it looks exactly like hawked-up, disease-infested, tobacco-chummed sputum, I know—is actually a previously unknown species of slime mold I have discovered. It is alive.”

It is the habit of those 150 of us who work in the camp and get sweaty to shower in the few minutes before those 500 of us who work off camp return. It is our good fortune, because the camp is not crowded then and the showers are not packed with dangerous elbows that fly around as men suds up. I can shower and change and still be ready for mail call at three forty-five, fresh and happy as a fucking clam. After mail call, I stand in front of my bunk waiting for the hacks to come count us again in case someone has thrown a ladder over the white line and escaped today, taking solace in the fact that I only have to work on Dorm Four for another couple of years.

John and I are together in the gang of fifty inmates who are standing outside the visiting room Saturday morning waiting to be called inside. We have heard our names on the speaker, but we already knew Patience and Alice were coming. This is our third visit. We’ve been here a month. We’ve gotten rid of our high-water pants and managed to get at least two pairs of new socks each. We are each wearing our new socks and our running shoes, which we are allowed to wear when we are not working. New socks are a premium in camp because the clothing room rarely issues them and buying them at the commissary is expensive on sixteen dollars a month. We’ve both noticed that some inmates have entire wardrobes of new clothes as well as new socks and new boots. There is a hierarchy of prisoners here, some kind of power elite exists, but the workings of this fellowship are invisible to us so far. I point to a Cuban inmate standing fifteen feet ahead of us whose tailored, ironed shirt fits like a glove. “Look at that guy’s uniform, John.”

“Looks like the guys in basic who had their uniforms tailored,” John says.

“Who the hell wants to tailor a goddamn prison uniform?” I say.

“He does, Bob.”

I look at John. He’s springing up and down on his toes, then twisting his torso, stretching, then feeling his biceps. “You look like you’re getting in shape, John.”

“You can tell?” John said.

“Yeah, but it’s kind of annoying, you know, watching you fondle yourself in public.”

“You’re a real happy guy, Bob,” John says. I’ve hurt his feelings. John has decided, as have many others, that if he’s going to be here, he will get in shape. He’s starving himself, eating celery and ice cubes between modest meals (we have an ice machine in each dorm), jogging five miles every day, and working out at the weight shack. He’s losing weight and firming up, no doubt about it, but being around him during this process is like being around a born-again Christian who’s just quit smoking so he won’t offend the other guys at the AA meetings while he talks to them about quitting coffee.

I wasn’t going to do that. I knew that every one of these guys would revert back to being normal beer-drinking, potbellied Americans the minute they got back on the street. I didn’t want to waste my energy starting robust new habits I’d only break later. I walked every day for thirty or forty minutes, but I had been doing that at home.

The hack in charge of the visiting room this weekend, Rocky, calls our names. We go inside.

Patience and Alice were standing in the crowd of wives who were greeting their men. I went to her and we hugged. We kissed our official greeting kiss. I followed her to the table she and Alice had prepared for us. This being their third visit, they now knew the ropes—the ins and outs of visiting your man at Eglin. They had brought in a big bowl of fresh fruit, half a dozen croissants, yogurt, instant Bustelo coffee, and more, and that was just for breakfast. Patience showed me the new freezer chest she’d bought, inside of which were the makings of a gourmet lunch.

The sight of all this plenty was both heartening and depressing. I like this kind of food—it was just that it offered the contrast that I was able to avoid when I was in camp tending Dorm Four. Here in the visiting room, the fact that I was a prisoner in a prison—whose wife worked cleaning houses to support herself and our son (she had not yet gotten enough of the money I’d made on the book to quit) and drove two hundred miles and camped out in a tent at a nearby campground—was obvious. It made the punishment all the more painful.

After coffee and a croissant, Patience and I went outside and walked laps on the concrete path around the yard. I told her of my adventures as keeper of the grounds around Dorm Four, which she took to be funny.

Patience told me how nice everyone was back in High Springs. We’d wondered how the people of High Springs, a small (population five thousand) rural southern town, would react to the news that I was a convicted drug smuggler—and had been walking, unknown as such, among them for two years. It turned out they were very supportive. One man told me, just before I’d left for prison, that I shouldn’t worry. “Hell, Bob, there’s a lot of people in this town made their living making moonshine. People understand about pot. You don’t have to worry about nothing.” Another man, Bob Ryan, who operated the country store up the road from us, sent this message with Patience: “Tell Bob I’m feeling real safe now; knowing he’s up there in prison and not able to sneak into my house some night while I’m asleep and stuff one of them marijuana cigarettes in my mouth.” Patience told me she’d met a couple—Mike Costello, a Vietnam veteran, and his wife, Patti Street, who had been one of Jack’s teachers. Mike had written a novel about Vietnam called A Long Time from Home, which he was in the process of getting published. She told me Mike was cutting firewood for her so she’d be ready for winter. Patience had passed a petition around town, which hundreds of people signed, and sent it to Judge Sol Blatt, asking him to give me an alternative sentence.

In conjunction with the petitions, we had hired (with the extra advance from Viking against my royalties) a group known as the National Center for Institutions and Alternatives (NCIA), which was preparing an appeal of my sentence to the judge. In support of their work, people—readers and friends from all over the country—were sending hundreds of letters to the NCIA, which would be submitting them to Judge Blatt. The goal of NCIA was to have me released to work in my community as an alternative to incarceration—there are Dorm Fours in every community. Tom Wolfe, the chief of police of High Springs, even wrote a letter saying he’d watch over me personally, make sure I did my work.

I had not much hope in the success of this appeal, and the fact that so many people supported me was both exhilarating and heartbreaking. I’d never had so many friends in my life. I was guilty as hell and paying the price. I did not believe I deserved to be helped.

We walked slow laps around the short path, Patience clinging to me like I was going to be snatched away any second. I was feeling miserable. I had come to some kind of adjustment, a balance with myself about being in prison that this walk was upsetting. “Patience. Do you realize that if you keep coming up here every other week, we’ll have to go through this at least fifty times?”

“How do you know? You haven’t even seen the parole board yet. And the NCIA petition, you don’t know how that will work, either.”

“True, I don’t know anything for sure, but I have a strong feeling about it. Everybody here figures he shouldn’t be here. And they’re probably right. If God considered each person’s whole life and compared it with the fuckup that got him here, most of these guys wouldn’t be here. But that’s not how it works. I’m going to get the standard two years, what they give people who smuggle three thousand pounds of pot. They don’t care if I’m a nice guy and this is my first crime.”

Patience nodded. “We’ll see. In the meantime, I’ll come see you every other week.”

“Patience, having you come here is killing me. I hate the visiting room. It’s like a fucking bus station—no, it’s worse; it’s like waiting in a dentist’s office for two days with one Elks magazine. It took me three days to get over the last visit.”

We stopped on the walkway and she stared at me. “Well, how often do you want me to come?”

“The truth?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t want you to come. I’ll see you when I get a furlough. I want to work at Dorm Four and never know what’s going on outside until they tell me I can walk out of here. That’s what I want.”

Patience looked like she was going to cry. She shut her eyes and said, “I have to come, Bob. I have to. I have to see you to believe you exist.”

We started walking again. Damn, this was so complicated: other people’s feelings. It was easy for me, I didn’t have any. I was numb. Why couldn’t Patience just go numb, too? “Okay,” I said. “How about once a month?”

“Every two weeks, Bob. That’s what I need. That’s all you can do for me now.”

John and Alice were strolling toward us, John chewing on one of an endless chain of puffed-rice crackers he ate between celery stalks during the visits. Abreast of us, John said, “How you doing, Bob?”

“Fine,” I said. “Fucking fine, John.”

Sunday afternoon, after twelve hours of visiting spread over two days, I was lying on my cot trying to disappear. I wanted to go to sleep and wake up in two years.

In addition to extreme boredom and humiliation in conjunction with visiting, another of the problems of sitting with your wife for such long periods is that the subject of sex invariably rises. If you watched carefully, and God knows I had the time, you could see couples playing skillfully disguised, tender sex games: A wife turns to look out the window and brushes her hand across her husband’s lap. The husband does the same. A skirt overlaps a man’s pocket and you can see the movement of her hand when the hack is not looking—that old hole-in-the-pocket routine. These people were sex-starved and were doing things in public they’d never dream of doing normally.

There is the stump of a large oak tree in the visiting yard sawed off level with the ground that, before it had been toppled, had shielded some daring couples who, with friends on lookout, would enter into coital bliss while the hacks wandered around unaware of the fact. Eventually some actual criminal—a Christian zealot, it was said—blew the whistle on a couple of fornicators and the prison administration sent the guy to a real prison over in Tallahassee and took vengeance on the oak tree.

Well, Patience and I played these games, too, with the result that the young male malady known as “lover’s nuts” or “blue balls,” depending on where you’re from, struck me. It was not sexy. It was painful. The only cure I knew of was to go hide in one of the stalls in the bathroom with a bottle of Johnson’s Baby Oil (a popular product in camp) and work it out. If I didn’t do that, I’d have an embarrassing reaction to the water spray when I showered which was impossible either to hide or to attend because, as I mentioned, our showers were public. My great fear was that some hairy, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound, weight-shack faggot (no gays were allowed in Eglin, but who knows?) would smile and take as an invitation—trolling with live bait, if you will—my predicament. All in all, visiting was not profitable for me.

Two months later. I was sitting in one of the two park benches behind Dorm Four smoking a cigarette. Dorm Four was now perfect. I had even taken to combing tiny tree detritus from the lawns with my rake as fast as it landed, falling from the overhead and totally uncontrollable tree branches. I was having a hard time coming up with much else to do. Dorm Four could have been put in a glassed-in diorama at a museum, it was so perfect. Across from me, sitting on the other park bench behind Dorm Four, was George Allen, the caretaker of Dorm Five, which was identical to Dorm Four, right next door. George and I, both being custodians of entire dormitory grounds, had a lot in common and had taken to meeting like this daily, just before lunch, to have a smoke break and talk about new things to do to our dorms. “I saw you washing your sidewalks today,” I said to George. George smiled sheepishly. “You like it? The way it looks?” “Yeah,” I said jealously. “It looks nice while the concrete is wet—” “I know,” George said, looking exasperated. “If only there was some way to keep that wet look—”

“And, of course,” I added sharply, “these pigs get their feet wet and track up the halls and stuff. Bet that pisses off the inside cleaning crew.”

“Yeah,” George said, shrugging. “It may not work out.” He reached into his shirt pocket, brought out a pack of smokes, and leaned forward to offer one. I crushed out mine—it was short—in my five-gallon plastic bucket so as not to ruin the swirls I’d made in the sand of my butt bucket, and took a new one from George. We lighted up.

We sat and puffed contentedly for a while. George was a real skinny guy, jumpy and serious. He puffed sharply and looked over his shoulder often. “You don’t have to worry about Simpson,” I said. “He told me our dorms were the pride of the camp.”

“He did?”

No, but what the fuck. “Yes. Yesterday.”

George nodded happily, gazing over at Dorm Five. I could see he was eager to get up and attend to a fallen leaf or something. I wanted just to wait the fifteen minutes or so until lunch, so I said, “So, George, you never talk about how you got here. Everybody knows how I got here.”

George smiled, looking embarrassed. “I know, but it’s so stupid. You’d laugh.”

“I promise,” I said, shaking my head.

George puffed quickly, deciding, and said, “Sporting goods.”

“Say again?”

George spoke so softly I could barely make it out. “Got arrested for buying stolen sporting goods.”

Naturally, I laughed.

George looked away and stared at a couple of guys—cooks, by their whites—walking down by the water. “Sorry. Sorry, George. It wasn’t funny. It must be the way you say it.”

George nodded. “Oh, I know what people think,” he said. “Compared to you guys—dope smugglers and crooked attorneys and rip-off stockbrokers and busted politicians and stuff—it must sound real wimpy. But I got five years for buying a truckload of exercise equipment from a guy. I had no idea the stuff was stolen. It was cheap, sure, but that’s business. Isn’t it? Looking for a good deal?”

“Yeah, sure is. I was in business once myself, George.”

“Really?”

“Yep. Manufactured mirrors in New York.”

“Huh.” George grunted. “Sounds interesting.”

“Oh, it was. Fascinating,” I said. “So, George. You buy the stuff from this guy. How do the cops know about it?”

“Oh. That’s easy. The guy is working for the cops.”

“What?”

“Yeah,” George said, leaning forward, all embarrassment gone, getting into the story. “See, this guy hijacks this big semi truck full of stuff somewhere in New York. Then he takes it over to New Jersey to sell it. He gets caught—I don’t know how. Then the cops tell him if he drives down the East Coast and sells the same truckload of shit to sporting goods places, they won’t prosecute him.”

“The guy who stole the stuff?”

“Yes. So he goes down the road stopping everywhere, offering the stuff at a third of what it’s worth. Anyone who goes for it gets busted the minute they say okay.”

“You didn’t actually buy the stuff?”

“Nope. I agreed to buy it. Then the cops come swarming out of cars parked nearby. Guy has a bug on him, you know?” George looked real sad suddenly. “I got five years, and then my business starts to fail because I’m in jail and my wife doesn’t know how to handle it and then she gets pissed off because I was away so long and she finally left me about a year ago.”

Now I was really not happy I asked. But I had to know: “George. What happened to this guy? The original thief?”

“Him? Oh, nothing. They kept their promise. They let him go for cooperating with the police.”

We sat smoking cigarettes for a while, not saying anything. I was beginning to think that the government spent most of its time setting up crimes and corralling the suckers who’d go for it. George’s was just one of many stories about a technique for crime control that is illegal in all industrial nations except our own. In England, for example, George could not have been arrested because the criminal act he was involved in had been set up by the police. You have to actually commit a crime on your own to get arrested in England.

But George could have been lying. People sought me out to tell me their stories because, they said, I was a writer and people ought to know what happened to them. When listening to these stories, I’d wonder, Why’s this guy telling me this? Does this story have anything to do with the truth? But I listened. You can learn a lot about people from the stories they tell and how they tell them. It’s all interesting.

“How long you been in charge of Dorm Five, George?” I asked.

“Coming up on a year,” George said.

“I think that if I have to work on this dorm that long, I will go nuts.”

“Yeah? I don’t mind. It’s easy work and I like making the place look good. I do that all the time at home. Jane is always saying—” George stopped talking and flicked his cigarette out on my yard and stared at it. The smoke swirled lazily in the still air. I’d have told him to pick it up, but this was a bad moment for George.

“I don’t know exactly why I hate it,” I continued. “But I hate it. I don’t care how this place looks. I want to get to a typewriter.”

“You can type?” George said, interested.

“Yeah. I’ve always been able to type. Learned in high school.”

“Well, Deacon just asked me if I knew anyone who could type. His boss is looking for a replacement for him.”

“Deacon’s leaving?”

“Yeah. In about a month.”

“Who do I see?”

“Deacon or that guy, what’s his name? The guy who helps him run the clothing room?” George stared at me, then his eyes rolled up looking in the top of his head, searching for the memory. I didn’t know who he meant. I thought a hack ran the clothing room. “Foster. Don Foster. He’s the guy. He and some of the others eat early chow. You probably can see him right now.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Heavy guy, black hair, short; acts like he owns the place.”

I jumped up. “I’m gonna try it, George. Thanks.” I left my tools out next to a tree and walked up the sidewalk behind Dorm Five and went into the mess hall. About thirty men were still eating from the ten o’clock lunch period. The regular line didn’t start until eleven. I saw three men sitting at a table with a guy that matched George’s description. I walked over.

“You Foster?” I said.

“Yeah,” Foster said, looking piqued because I’d disturbed him at lunch.

“I hear they’re looking for somebody who can type over at your place.”

“Yeah. Typing’s part of the job. You also have to know how to run a small business.”

“I’m your man,” I said. “Where do I sign up?”

Foster shrugged. “Okay. Come over to the clothing room after lunch. I’ll get you in to see Mr. Baker and you can talk to him.”

“What time?”

“Say about two?”

“I’ll be there.”

CHAPTER 27

Baker was a tall guy, probably six feet four. He spent most of his time smiling. He sat in his executive’s chair behind a gray government desk, fidgeting with a wooden puzzle that could be made into the letter L, if you knew how. I stood in his office while his inmate lieutenants questioned me. The inmate cadre of the clothing room was Deacon, the head boss; Foster, next in line; and a guy they called Rusty, a crackly voiced old guy who seemed to be kind of a Gabby Hayes sidekick for Baker.

I told them about my business experience in New York.

Deacon finally said, “I think we could give him a try, Mr. Baker. I’m not leaving for a month; we got time to find somebody else if he doesn’t work out.”

Baker nodded, smiling. He had just put the puzzle together. “Deacon, we’ll do whatever you think is best.” Baker turned to me. “We want you to start as soon as you can, Mr. Mason.”

“Okay. But I’m not sure how you go about it, you know?”

“Oh. Well, you have to apply for a job transfer. Through your counselors,” Baker said.

I guess my face dropped. I’d heard of guys trying to get job transfers for their entire stay at Eglin. Deacon said, “Don’t worry. We can get that done fast enough. You just get the blank paperwork from your counselor and bring it back here.”

I hung out in the hallway by the counselor’s office in Dorm Five, the dorm I would be going to when I got out of Three. My counselor, Mr. Josephson, whom the inmates called Waterhead, finally came down the hall after lunch. I was in a rush because I had to be back at my post before Simpson noticed I was gone. I’d waited until he drove by on the service road. Usually I didn’t see him again for an hour, but there were no guarantees. Simpson didn’t miss much, and there were so many ball-busting jobs, like digging ditches, planting trees, or shoveling gravel, that he had going on all the time, that he had plenty of fun things to keep you busy if he thought you were fucking off. I almost called Mr. Josephson by his nickname, Waterhead, because the hacks’ nicknames were what we knew them by, but I managed to say, “Mr. Josephson, can I get a form from you?” as soon as he was close to his door.

“What kind of form?”

“A job-transfer request.”

Waterhead nodded for a second. “Sure, come on in.” Waterhead was actually a very nice guy. He looked a little loopy, and he wasn’t going to give you an answer to a math problem real fast, but he was fair with the inmates, actually tried to help them. He unlocked his door with a key he kept on a recoil reel chain attached to his belt. Inside, he pulled out a big file drawer and flipped through the folders. He pulled out a form. “Here we go,” he said, handing it to me. “You realize the chances of you getting a transfer are pretty slim?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.”

Waterhead nodded. “You have to have some good reason, Mason, not just some whim.”

“I understand. I just thought I’d try.”

“Sure. Why not?” Waterhead said. He stared at me for a minute until I realized my business was over. I said good-bye and left.

I checked my watch. I’d been gone five minutes. I walked across the camp to the clothing room as fast as I could walk. This time, I didn’t see Baker. Deacon took me to his desk in the back room, just behind the complaint window, and sat down. Sitting at a table was the blond gimpy guy, John; a short dark guy named Joe; a one-legged kid named Griffis; a guy in his sixties, Tony Abruzzo, said to be in the Mafia; and Don Foster. Joe and John and Griffis were sorting underwear into piles of small, medium, and large, while Foster talked to Abruzzo. Foster, who owned a car dealership in New Orleans, was an executive in the clothing room and didn’t have to actually work. Abruzzo was telling stories about his early days as a young hood in New York. I tried to listen in while Deacon turned on his typewriter, since I’d never been around a Mafioso before, if that is what he was.

Deacon had a typewriter, an IBM Selectric. Deacon took the form and twirled it into the carriage, began typing. I had never seen anybody type that fast in my life. Brrrrrip! and he rolled the form out, held it up, and read it through the bottom of his bifocals. “Yeah. Looks good,” he said. He told me to wait a minute, got up, and went into Baker’s office. I watched him take the form to Baker through the window next to his desk. He put the form in front of Baker, who was busy talking to Rusty. Deacon put his finger on the form where he wanted it signed. Baker glanced down, nodded distractedly and signed it. Deacon came back and handed it to me. “Okay. You’ve requested a transfer, and the head of the place where you want to work just approved it. Take it back to your counselor and get him to sign it. Do not give it to him. The usual chain-of-command bullshit could take weeks, months. Just have him sign it; then take it to the south unit manager, Mr. Thompson.”

“I give it to Thompson?”

Deacon stared at me for a second. “Yeah. Give it to Thompson. He’ll have gotten a phone call by then.”

I nodded and walked back to Dorm Five. I found George and checked to see if he’d seen Simpson yet. No, maybe he wouldn’t be coming around for another hour.

I went inside and knocked on Waterhead’s door. It was really fortunate I was getting this done during the normal working hours. Usually, after hours, the chairs in the hallway outside the office were filled with inmates waiting to see him.

“Come in.”

“I brought that job transfer request back for you to sign, Mr. Josephson.”

“Huh? I haven’t even sent it to wherever you wanted to transfer to yet,” Waterhead said.

“No need,” I said. “It’s already been approved.”

“What?”

I put the paper on his desk. He read it. “Inmate requests work transfer to the clothing room.” Waterhead looked up. “That’s it? You didn’t put down why and Mr. Baker signs it?”

“Yessir. They need a clerk real bad.”

Waterhead nodded and picked up his phone. I looked out his window and saw Simpson’s blue truck cruise by. Simpson was talking to Barnett, who was riding in the cab with him. “Larry?” Waterhead said. “I have a transfer here, from an inmate Mason. You approved his request?” He listened for a second and nodded. “Huh? Oh, nothing. I just thought this was too fast to be true, you know?” He listened for another second. “Okay. Sure, I’ll sign it. If you need a guy, you need a guy.”

After work I dropped the form off at the unit manager’s office. He didn’t say anything, just nodded and said that was all; I’d hear from them later.

After dinner, Foster came by my bunk and told me to report to work the next morning at nine.

“It’s approved?” I said.

“Sure. Baker needs you because Deacon’s leaving soon. Deacon’s going to need the time to train you. You’ll have to know how to run the clothing room. The assistant warden already signed it. You’ll see it posted on the bulletin board tonight.”

“He wants me to run the clothing room? Somebody told me you ran the clothing room,” I said.

“Naw. Deacon does. I do the receiving for the commissary.”

“Receiving?”

“Yeah, when the stuff shows up from the vendors. I check it in. I calculate the markup. I do inventories now and then. Like that.”

I was actually getting out of landscrape? I wondered what the warden would say when he found out. Maybe he’d never notice.

Baker’s office was an air-conditioned box in the middle of the clothing room fitted with five big windows. From his desk, Baker could watch the inmates who ran the clothing room line on his left and the inmates who ran the back room, where the complaint window was, on his right. He could not see Tom in the alteration shop, Timmy in the shoe shop, or the several inmates who did special washes and ironing.

Inmate clothing was washed at the Air Force laundry. The clothing room sent big rolling bins filled with dirty clothes in a blue van. The van brought back the clean laundry from the previous day when it returned. The ten or so men in the clothing room line sorted the truckload of clean clothes by laundry number and put it into the inmate boxes.

Inside the office, Larry Baker sat behind his desk and mostly talked with his inmate bosses, who sat in a couple of leather chairs which used to be in the inmate quiet rooms (which were now noisy recreation rooms).

Baker assigned me a desk next to the door at the front of the office. Actually, I shared this desk with Foster, but he seldom used it. Deacon’s desk, and presumably mine when he left, was in the issue and repair room, in sight of Baker.

Deacon showed me his system of books in which he logged in every required task and checked it off when done. He managed everything, a kind of master sergeant for the company commander, Baker. All Baker wanted to know about anything was where he was supposed to sign. If he got questions back from the front office, he was briefed by Deacon. Usually Baker would ask Deacon to compose and type the responses to queries from administration. Among my first tasks was to write a report to administration about why we needed to order some new boots.

Deacon loaded me up with typing jobs and kept a careful watch on my output. When he figured I could type well enough, he began to teach me how to conduct inventories of the stockrooms. Inventory reports were due every quarter, but we did one when I’d been at the clothing room for a couple of weeks so I could start off with a fresh slate. Everything in the warehouses was stacked neatly, labeled. The inventories were professionally done. Deacon took his job very seriously.

The only time it was wildly busy at the clothing room was in the afternoon when the inmates returned from work. Lines of inmates, sometimes a hundred or more, formed up in the afternoons to get their laundry. The rest of the day was fairly slow. Inmates sorted clothes and bullshitted, keeping an eye out for intruders from administration who expected to see inmates working at a feverish pace no matter the work load—just like anywhere else.

While Deacon trained me, we became friendlier. Deacon was a curmudgeon, a proud and ornery man in his late sixties. When we walked back to his dorm one afternoon, he told me he’d been in jail once before, during World War II, for resisting the draft. He had gone to jail at that time for his beliefs, but this incarceration was a setup. Deacon was a biochemist. He’d shown me two texts he’d published. As head of the anthropology department at a large university, he’d been making his own psychotropic drugs with which to test his lab animals. He claimed he could guarantee consistent quality in the drugs by making his own—stuff like LSD. Being around the utterly serious and caustic Deacon, it wasn’t difficult to believe that he had made a lot of enemies at the university. He was very abrasive, impatient, not at all given to platitudes and encouragement. A graduate student he’d refused to accommodate—something about low grades and a delayed graduation if Deacon wouldn’t help—turned him in for making the drugs. In court, Deacon didn’t deny making the drugs, claimed it was his professional right to make them if he wanted to, called the female prosecuting attorney at his trial a Nazi whore, and generally behaved like Deacon. He was famous in camp for refusing to go before the parole board to get his sentence reduced. He felt it would be groveling before inferior men. That cost him a couple of extra years. Deacon stood up for himself when most people at camp would call what he was doing pissing into the wind. I had to respect him.

Two weeks into the job, I was typing a letter for Baker when I heard “Warden’s coming” from the guys out on the porch. I looked up and saw the warden and his assistant walking down the service road toward us, the same warden who had said, “No writers around typewriters.” I jumped up from my desk and told Baker I had to leave for a minute. He nodded, but he was himself getting organized for the impromptu inspection. His bosses had run out to their respective crews, and in seconds the clothing room was bustling with activity. Twenty inmates moved stacks of clothes from where they were to where they weren’t and then back again. It was all very impressive. I ran through the issue room and into the stockroom, where I hid behind a tall stack of Army blankets.

It took about five minutes for the warden to get to the stockroom. I heard him talking to Baker in the hallway, his voice muffled. His voice got louder as he came into the stockroom. He looked around quickly, said the place looked good, and left. When I heard the all clear, I went back to my desk.

“Where’d you go, Bob?” Baker said.

“Had to go to the john. Stomach,” I said.

“Too bad,” Baker said.

I fell into step. My days had become routine, which I could follow while thinking of other things. Up at seven. Breakfast at seven-thirty. Read from eight to nine. Go to work at nine. Lunch at ten-thirty. Back to work at one. Dinner at four-thirty. Walk and shower, one hour. Free time until sleep.

In November, Viking sent Knox a check for more than a hundred thousand dollars, and Chickenhawk was still selling well. When Knox told me this, it felt like he was talking about somebody else’s book.

Patience would get the money and could finally quit her house-cleaning work. I was grateful she could stop. Maybe she’d finish that novel she’d been working on. Anyway, that was her world.

I was here. I lived on my twenty-five dollars a month. I had a full-time job. I had dropped out of the real 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.”

I looked through the window into Baker’s office. The only other desk was the one in there. To be cooped up with a hack all day was really asking too much. I figured I had enough clout, even being new, to force John to give up the desk. I watched him. I noticed that Joe and Tony Abruzzo, the two guys who work with John, were watching me to see what I’d do. Technically, John worked for me. He managed the clothing issue and repair room efficiently. He was probably the only guy in camp who knew how to do it and cared enough to do it right. It was to my benefit that I didn’t have to monitor him and also to my benefit that I didn’t have to learn his job to be able to monitor him. All I really wanted was not to have to sit in Baker’s office all day.

“How about if I just borrow your typewriter now and then? When you’re not using it?”

John smiled. He’d been tensed up, ready for a confrontation. I could see him relaxing. “Sure. I’m usually up and working anyway. Help yourself.”

As I walked to Baker’s door, I could hear Tony Abruzzo, the Mafioso, laughing. “Good job, John. You defended your fucking territory like a man.” I guess it looked like I’d lost.

“There he is. There he is,” Baker said, smiling a huge smile, as I walked into his office. Rusty, his almost constant companion, grinned. “So, Bob,” Baker said. “What does it all mean? Really?”

I sat down at my desk and flipped on the typewriter. Baker asked the same question every morning, and every morning I’d give the same answer: “I just don’t know, Mr. Baker.”

Baker laughed like this was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, every day. What he was laughing about was all the oddball reasons people were sent to this prison. He collected incarceration histories like people collect stamps. His friend, Wally the counselor, kept him up-to-date on all the strange ones.

Baker said a guy had just arrived in camp for scaring a bear. “Imagine that, would you?” Baker laughed hard enough to make his face red. “This fellow scares a fucking bear. I mean a bear, you know: four legs, black and hairy, long snout? A fucking bear! He scares this bear, you know? Boo!” Baker put his thumbs in his ears and wiggled his fingers. “And now he’s in Eglin for six damn months.” Baker laughed more and finally added his ultimate comment: “Bob. What does it all mean? Really?”

“I just don’t know, Mr. Baker.”

On Christmas Eve, many of the staff of Eglin—guards, secretaries, counselors—distributed gift packages donated by the government and by local citizens. We lined up, walked outside to get our packages, and walked back inside. We got a vinyl notebook with a pad of paper, two Bic ballpoint pens, a box of envelopes, two bars of Zest soap, two handkerchiefs wrapped in plastic, a six-pack of Juicy Fruit gum, and a calendar you could use to mark off the days.

CHAPTER 28

By New Year’s 1984, 1 had quit smoking. I was walking forty-five minutes a day.

I think I must have been healthy, but I didn’t feel healthy. I woke up every morning with a new, insidiously minor, malady. Usually I felt some new pain in my head which I assumed was a new tumor. The pains got worse over the course of several weeks until I woke up one morning with a migraine. The pain was so intense I couldn’t open my eyes. Light hurt, even the dim light inside the dorm. I staggered to the infirmary, where they gave me aspirins and told me to go back to bed. My head felt like it was expanding. I lay in bed with a cold washcloth on my forehead and hung on. Then I got nauseous, went into the bathroom, and threw up. I went back to the infirmary, and while I was trying to explain to the aide there how bad I felt, I threw up again. They told me that there was nothing they could do, I just had to hang on. The next time I felt one coming on, they said, come over and they’d give me something to prevent the attack. By dusk the headache was gone. I walked outside and felt like I’d just been reborn. I took a deep breath, smiled at the squirrels, marveled at the rosy glow of the sunset. Not having the pain was like feeling exquisite pleasure. Ordinary life, I realized, is constant, exquisite pleasure which I take for granted. I resolved never to forget again. Life, just being alive without pain, how wonderful. The next morning, I’d forgotten my revelation and went back to work.

We were sitting around the issue-room table telling stories one afternoon when a man appeared in front of John’s desk. He stood at ease—I mean, the “at ease” you’re taught in the military, feet apart, hands clasped behind your back. When John looked up, the man straightened to attention.

“Yes?” John said.

“Johnson. I’m here to pick up my clothes, sir.”

“You don’t have to call that asshole sir,” Tony said, laughing.

Johnson glanced at Tony, turned back to John. He said nothing.

I said, “When did you go?”

Johnson’s eyes met mine. “1967 through 1969, sir.”

John got up to get the bundle of clothes already picked out for the new prisoner.

“You don’t have to call him sir, either, Johnson,” Tony said, making a face at me, signifying the guy was a little off.

The man ignored Tony, something Tony was not at all used to.

“When were you there?” Johnson said to me.

“1965. First Cav.”

“You flew helicopters,” Johnson announced.

“Yes. What did you do?”

“I killed Vietnamese, sir.”

“What unit?”

“I was a Seal, sir.”

“Too bad,” I said. “I heard that was a tough job.”

“I liked to kill Vietnamese, sir.”

John plunked down the bundle of clothes. The man picked it up, about-faced, and walked out the door.

“That guy isn’t back yet,” Tony Abruzzo said.

Later, Mr. Baker told me about Johnson. It seems the staff all knew about him.

“The guy was a Seal,” Baker said.

I nodded.

“Well, he lived in Key West, heard about a pot bust, heard that the boat, still loaded, was at the Navy base there. This guy gets dressed in black—black face paint and stuff—sneaks into the base at night. He attacks, subdues, gags, and ties up the two sentries guarding the boat loaded with the evidence and then he steals the fucking boat! All by himself!” Baker started laughing. “I mean, this is one tough fucker.”

“How’d they get him?”

“Well, it was by accident,” Baker said. “The relief guards showed up early, and in a few minutes they were chasing this Seal guy down with patrol boats, searchlights, loudspeakers telling him to stop, all that. He wouldn’t. They had to shoot the boat to splinters, blow up the engine, to get him.” Baker shook his head in admiration. “Not many people like him in the real world.”

As February drew near, I began to look forward to my first furlough, one day in the local area. John and I had both applied, our wives had requested the furlough, all things that had to be done were done. We waited.

John got his approval and came to my new cube in Dorm Five to tell me. I checked the bulletin board. Nothing. I went to the counselor’s office and waited in the hallway. After an hour wait, I asked Waterhead what had happened. “They wouldn’t approve it. You’re considered a high-profile prisoner, Bob. They’re afraid the press might make a big deal about the furlough program if they let you go,” Waterhead said, not able to look me in the eye.

I met John in the mess hall and told him. He looked very upset. He was caught in the middle of one of the few good things that could happen to you at Eglin, a furlough, and a bad thing: his codefendant and friend was denied the same furlough. We ate in silence.

I walked longer than usual that evening and went to bed early. The next day, at lunchtime, I went into Waterhead’s office and told him, “This is about the most chickenshit operation I’ve ever seen. You idiots furloughed the captain of the fucking boat I was on as a crew member, a man who’s got a third longer sentence than mine, and refused to furlough me because I wrote a book. You are all assholes.” Waterhead said nothing. I slammed his door as I left.

I still didn’t feel any better, though.

Patience and I visited in the visiting room while John and Alice stayed at the beach.

The next possible furlough was in August.

I felt nails going into my skull, over my left eye, and went to the infirmary. They gave me Cafergot, a drug that constricts blood vessels. The pain vanished. The side effect of the drug is nausea, which, in comparison, is a delight.

I saw Johnson, the Seal, buffing the floor while I was at the infirmary. I asked him how he was doing. He said fine, they had him on Thorazine. “That makes me feel calm, sir.” I nodded. When I left, I saw Johnson still buffing the hall, face placid. He’d already polished the whole length of the hallway to a gleaming mirror finish; he had now started over.

I went to work.

Officially I was the inmate in charge of the clothing room, but Foster seemed to be getting the perks. For one thing, he got Post Raisin Bran at breakfast when no one else could. I tried being right behind Foster in the breakfast line, but there was never any Raisin Bran when I got to the bin. I asked Foster about it.

“I make a deal here, a deal there,” he said.

I didn’t know what he was talking about. I spent nearly every minute at work working. I didn’t have time to make deals. And what kind of deals could I make anyway?

“Rags are good,” Foster said.

“Rags?”

“Yeah,” Foster said, nodding toward an inmate kitchen worker. “See that rag hanging out of his pocket?”

I looked. Sure, all the guys who worked in the mess hall had rags to wipe the tables and stuff. “Yeah. What about them?”

“Where do you suppose those rags come from?”

Foster, a wealthy businessman on the outside, was a rag broker in Eglin?

“I wouldn’t be telling you about this, Mason, except I’m leaving in a month. I might as well let you in on some of my contacts.”

After we ate, Foster took me back behind the serving counter, into the mess hall kitchen, and introduced me to the hack who ran the place, Evans. Evans nodded when Foster told him I was taking his place. “He can get the rags?” Evans asked.

“Yeah, I’m setting him up today.”

“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.”

“Hello, sir. May I enter?”

I wanted to tell Johnson to stop calling me sir, but you could tell that was how he wanted it, how he saw the world, I think. He sat across from me on my folding chair. I sat up against the headboard of the lower bunk.

“I’ll be leaving soon,” Johnson said.

“Really? You just got here. I heard you got five years. Judge give you a break?”

“My employers are getting me out.”

“Your employers?”

“Yes,” Johnson said with finality. I was not to ask for details. Either he was a total looney, or he was telling the truth.

Johnson said nothing for a long moment. Then: “I have bad dreams, sir.”

I nodded. “I understand. So do I.”

“I know. That’s why I’m here. Civilians can’t understand. I’ve always had them, but they’re getting worse. I have them while I’m awake. I see people. People I’ve killed.”

This guy was messed up. I was the only one he could talk to? “Do you have a wife, Johnson? A girlfriend? Someone close?”

“No, sir. No family. I had a wife. I woke up strangling her, sir. I am afraid to fall asleep with a woman, so I don’t make friends with them.”

I swallowed. I thought I had it bad? “What did you do there, Johnson? What’d they make you do?”

“I am an assassin, sir. I worked alone, mostly. My specialty was taking out individual targets. They’d want a particular man, in a Viet Cong-controlled village, usually a village elder or leader, killed. Just the one man, usually. The idea was not just to kill the man, but to scare the rest of the villagers.”

“You could sneak into a Viet Cong village, kill a guy, and get back out?”

“Yes. I never bathed. I smelled like the jungle. I’d get into the man’s village, past their trip wires and punjis. I’d get into his house. I can see him sleeping on his mats. His wife is only a few feet away. I hold him down, sink my knife under his sternum, into his heart, hold him until he stops jerking, and leave. The dogs don’t bark. I am the jungle. When they find him the next day, it scares them because it shows that no one is safe at night. I once stayed to watch, it was so close to dawn. The whole village wailed and cried. I was in a tree, watching them like you do ants. Women, kids, screaming in terror. I didn’t feel a thing.”

I nodded. Johnson was staring at me. “You’re traumatized, Johnson. It’s part of the trauma, not feeling.”

“Yessir, so I’ve been told. But I think I’m just evil, sir. I liked to kill. I preferred killing alone, though. Sometimes, in teams, the leader would have us surround the village. Then they’d set it on fire. We’d just snipe the people as they ran away from the fire. Wasn’t much to it.”

“Except for the people being killed.”

“Except for the people being killed,” Johnson said, nodding. “I know something’s wrong. I should feel something. I remember they, the officers, started thinking I was taking my work too seriously, I was collecting ears. They made me stand down. Three days. Ordered me to rest, R&R in the camp, have some beers. I hated it. I don’t drink. I sat around camp the first day, not knowing what to do with myself. I cleaned my rifle, sharpened my knives. I went into the jungle that night. I came back the next morning with ears. Took them to the CO and tossed them on his desk. I said, ‘Three less for you to kill, sir.’ The CO, all of them, figured I was crazy, but I was also good at my job. They never made me stand down again.”

“You did this for three years straight? No leaves?”

“I never left. Only when I was transferred. My new employers wanted me to work elsewhere.”

“Where?”

Johnson shook his head. “Lots of places. You don’t want to know, sir.”

I nodded. I think I already knew too much. “You say these… these employers… they’re going to get you out of here?”

“Yessir. In two days. A job has come up.”

I swallowed. “How do you feel about that?”

“I hope he kills me, sir, but I’m afraid he can’t,” Johnson said. His eyes pierced mine. If ever a face looked truthful, Johnson’s did.

Two days later, Johnson, having served three months of a five-year sentence, was gone. I sincerely hope he got his wish.

CHAPTER 29

In June they assigned me my first permanent cube. It turned out to be one next to the main aisle, closest to the back door to the mess hall, and ten feet from the phone booth.

I accused Waterhead of picking it especially to torment me. I’d complained that the noise was giving me headaches. I just thought it was noisy before. Now it was cacophony. I applied for a transfer which was never granted. I traded some new socks for a set of earplugs from a tree-trimmer inmate. That didn’t work. I could hear myself swallow, the ringing in my ears, and the soft rumble of the noise I was trying to avoid. There is nothing louder than sound avoided.

Jeff, John Tillerman, and I were walking our laps one afternoon. Jeff said he’d been on a work detail at the Air Force warehouse where he worked with six other inmates. They had spent the day unloading all the brand-new cans of paint stored inside, throwing them into Dempster Dumpsters.

“They threw new paint away?” I said.

“Yep. Then they had us saw up strapped pallets of plywood with chainsaws into chunks we could fit into the Dumpsters.”

“Naw,” I said. “Really?”

“Really,” said Jeff. “It’s a fucking crime.”

John said, “Hell, some guys told me they buried a two-million-dollar jet engine. And remember when the Army was here a couple of months ago for some joint training operation? Well, they left all the C-rations and stuff they brought—excess. They have inmates digging huge trenches to bury whole fucking truckloads of food.”

I knew that the staffs at every military and government installation we supported all over the world were at this very moment doing very much the same thing. If they had any supplies left over at inspection time, their budgets would be cut. If their budgets were cut, it would imply that they were not doing their jobs. This could slow advancement among the military personnel and government civilian employees. The only thing to do, in this kind of system, was to get rid of the excesses, thereby proving that one’s agency was operating as described in the books. A commander or manager only had to point at his empty supply shelves; his requisite collection of office memos; his efficiency reports for every member of the staff; the monthly safety meeting reports, each with the signatures of all the staff, proving they had all been there; fire-drill maps that showed people how to walk out the doors; OSHA posters on every wall, and their one hundred percent participation in the payroll Savings Bond plan, to prove to the Inspector-General that everything was up to snuff. I knew this, and I tried to explain it to Jeff, but he didn’t seem to understand. John, being a veteran, knew what I was talking about.

Jeff was obsessed with the subject of government waste. He started to say something, but his voice was drowned out by a jet fighter taking off. It’s a stunning sight and we stopped to stare as the plane rose vertically on a column of smoke and disappeared into the deep blue upper atmosphere. Wow! What a kick that must be, I thought.

“How much does one of those things cost, Bob?” Jeff asked.

“F-16? I’m not sure. Somewhere around twenty million. I’d guess.”

Jeff nodded and we continued our walk. By the time we got by the weight shack, Jeff said, “Okay. If you figure that the average middle-class American family pays, say, five thousand dollars a year in taxes, then it takes four thousand families to buy that one plane we just saw, right?”

I nodded. John nodded. “Seems right,” I said.

“They say a person works three months to pay his federal taxes. Can you see it?” Jeff points out beyond the fence by the tennis court. “Four thousand families, twelve thousand people, each having given every penny of three months of their wages, all standing out there, beaming, as they watch the result of their labor blasting up into the sky?”

“Makes you feel proud, don’t it?” I said.

“Makes me sick,” Jeff said.

John laughed. “Think of this,” he said. “It costs about twenty thousand a year to keep each of us here. That’s about four taxpaying families for each of us, right?”

Jeff and I laughed, too. Jeff pointed out at the field and said, “Yep, there they are, over there next to the twelve thousand people who bought that plane. Twelve families, sitting on the grass over there, having a picnic, nodding with satisfaction every time they see us walk another lap. ‘Yep,’ Fred Taxpayer says, ‘getting our damn money’s worth, Edna. I worked three months to keep one of them foul fellows behind that white line for three months, and damned if I don’t feel just fine about it, too. Damn drug dealers. Pass me a beer, Edna.’”

“‘Why couldn’t we buy part of that plane, dear?’” John said, mimicking a woman’s voice. “‘We might, Edna. Next year. This year, we take care of these fellows,’” he said gruffly.

We were laughing like kids by now. I could almost see them, the taxpayers, grimly watching us paying our penance, believing they were winning some war on drugs our leaders said we were fighting. The thought was funny, but also depressing. I was a taxpayer, too.

Another F-16 blasted into the sky. I saw this flight differently because of Jeff. I wondered how many people had had to give good money for that one flight. There are thousands of such flights every day, all over the world. God! And what about all the people who work for the government? There are hundreds—no, thousands—of government departments. The money wasted! It boggles the mind.

When Foster left, he threw a giant ice-cream party, one of the biggest the camp had seen. Most of the inmates who left Eglin cashed in their commissary accounts in ice cream, had a party and invited their friends. Foster must have served ten gallons of ice cream. He also had a big bowl of fresh fruit salad and a huge chocolate cake from the kitchen. He collected much status as a prisoner doing this, but who was going to remember? He was leaving.

I now had custody of Foster’s programmable adding machine and the job of figuring the markup on the receivables. It only took me an extra five minutes a day doing it, and it got me into the commissary.

I hand delivered the commissary receiving forms to the commissary office in the afternoons. Miss Reed read them and signed them. I usually lingered there because it was interesting to be somewhere besides the clothing room, and Miss Reed was friendly. I could sit at a visitor’s chair in front of her desk and we’d gossip. I kept her up on what was happening at the clothing room; she told me the latest stuff going on in the administration building. Grumbles often joined in our conversations. Grumbles had his own desk across from Miss Reed, a radio, and his own IBM Selectronic typewriter, which he didn’t know how to use. I watched him type. Two fingers? No wonder I did all the typing for the commissary.

Two other guys, Frank Short and Joe Leone, worked as stock clerks in the commissary storeroom, which was piled floor to ceiling with boxes. They seldom came into Miss Reed’s office. If they had work to do, they were very busy. When they didn’t, Miss Reed let them off because they had to work every night in the commissary line. Grumbles and these two guys were the highest paid inmates in the camp. I made fourteen cents an hour at the clothing room, which adds up to nearly twenty-five dollars a month. Grumbles earned fifty a month, Frank and Leone split fifty, the other half of the hundred-a-month budget the prison provided for inmate pay at the commissary.

I liked being in the commissary. They needed me. I helped them do inventories. They needed to get organized. I was, after all, a school-trained former U.S. Army supply officer. Much of the stock was packed sloppily, leading to incorrect counts and inefficient restocking; there were several brands among rarely used items like chewing tobacco— a wasteful repetition; unnecessary duplication of ice-cream brands, which only took up more space; they needed better inventory forms. I might get a chance to straighten this place up—Grumbles was leaving. He’d told Reed they offered him two months at a halfway house, but he told them to stuff it. He was leaving in four months.

Despite our initial confrontation in the clothing room, John and I became friends over a period of a couple of months. He and I had to work closely together to manage the place for Baker. John and I did all the inventories in the clothing warehouses and decided what to order and how much to order for Baker. John and his crew did the grunt work. I handled the paperwork. We never mentioned the desk incident again, and I spent most of my free time sitting at his desk bullshitting with him and his team while they worked, like Foster used to do.

Tony Abruzzo had been a member of a New York street gang in the thirties, saw combat in World War II, eventually ended up working for the Mafia after the war. Crime, he explained, was his salvation. He grew up poor, his father a carpenter. He’d hijacked his first truck, in Manhattan traffic, when he was fourteen. When he was sixteen, his father gave him fifty cents pocket money. He had forty dollars in his pocket at the time and a car parked around the comer. His dad didn’t own a car.

“We didn’t know what the fuck we were doing,” Tony said. “We just figured a whorehouse was a place we’d see some money.” Tony folded shirts while he talked. “You know, a guy comes into these places to get laid, he’s got to have some money on him. So we, three of us, march up the stairs to this cathouse on Eighth and go inside. We timed it so we’d be the first. We tell the girls, ‘Hey, we’re taking over for a while.’ The madam says, ‘What?’ Joey, my partner, says, ‘You know, we’re the bosses now. Get to work.’

“The madam says, ‘Nobody’s here,’ and Joey says, he’s grinning like a kid, he says, ‘I’m here, sister. Start on me.’” Tony broke into laughter. “That fucking Joey was always a gas,” Tony said, tears welling in his eyes.

“So what’s the point? That’s the crime? You raped some whores?” John said.

“No, you dumb fucking cripple,” Tony said. Joey and John and I laughed. Abruzzo was abrasive and rude and everyone liked it. He called Baker a hillbilly redneck to his face and even Baker laughed. “Besides,” Tony said, “Joey pays the whore. Of course, he takes the money back, but that’s robbery, not rape. Anyway, what we did was to wait until the customers showed up. I’d pull my gun when they got inside, tell them to empty their pockets. They’d go, ‘Hey, you can’t do that,’ and I just smile and wave the gun. The gun does all the talking. They empty their pockets. Then I send them back to the girls, saying, ‘Hey, maybe you’re getting fucked, but at least you’ll get laid.’ I’m feeling like Robin Hood, here.” Tony stopped while we laughed.

John, my clothing room partner, and I were having early dinner at three. I’d had Baker put us on the list because John and I liked coming back to the clothing room and having coffee during the four o’clock count. It allowed us to think we were special not to be counted in the dorms. I filled out an “out-count” form every morning, which Baker signed, with our names and four others who worked in the back, including Jed Wilson, a new guy who was helping Timmy in the shoe room. During the count, John and I brewed instant Bustelo espresso and sat back in our swivel chairs in the issue room and bullshitted while we monitored the count’s progress on the loudspeakers. We talked about our crimes, our families. John had a brand-new son and showed me his picture often. After count, we managed the complaint window for an hour, told people they couldn’t have anything, and then we’d be off. It was pleasant.

John was in for smuggling marijuana, too. On his last trip he got caught in a storm, got beached at night, miles from his drop-off point. After a frantic night of getting a truck, unloading the pot, he set a fire to scuttle the boat. But the boat didn’t burn and sink like he’d planned and the police were able to trace him. Pot residue in the boat convicted him. John was appealing his case. The government only had a few ounces of pot as evidence, a misdemeanor, but the feds had calculated that the boat was carrying two tons, based on the size of the boat. John was outraged because he’d only had half that. Anyway, he had made successful trips, and I’ll never forget his description of how he felt after his first trip.

“I almost didn’t make it, Bob.” John was smiling, shaking his head. You could tell by the happy twist of his mouth and the shine of his eyes that he really loved smuggling. “Shit, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was lost half the time. But I got the stuff here. Delivered it to my partner. A week later he comes by my place, plops down a grocery bag on my coffee table. I look inside. Money. Bales of it.

“A few days later, I’m driving down U.S. 1 on my way to Fort Lauderdale. I’m driving a brand-new Mustang convertible that I bought with cash. The top is down. Jimmy Buffet is playing my favorite song on the tape player. I’m smoking some very nice weed, not the stuff I brought in. The sun is shining. I have over a hundred thousand dollars in a canvas tool bag in the trunk of the car. I am free.” He sighed. “Life can be good.”

Jed Wilson was sitting at our table in the mess hall telling John and me that he thought drugs were the ruination of America.

John said, “Jed, they put you in here for smuggling cocaine. Where do you get off?”

“Sure, I smuggled it, but I never once used it,” Jed said. “It was strictly business with me.”

John and I rolled our eyes.

“The truth,” Jed said, smacking his fist against his sternum. “God strike me fucking dead.”

John nodded. “You ever smoke any pot?”

“None of that, neither. Send you straight to hell.”

“Do you drink or anything?” John said.

Jed shook his head and said, “None of that. You want to know a legal way to get stoned that won’t send you to hell?” Jed leaned close to us.

“What’s that?” John said.

Jed smiled. I saw something black in his mouth, like his lower gum was dead or something. “Simple and legal,” Jed said. “You take a piece of fishing leader—you know, that clear kind? And you stick it into a cigarette. That’s it. Smoke that. That’ll fuck you up.”

John and I looked at each other.

I said, “Jed, that shit can kill you.”

“Better’n going to hell,” Jed said. “I been doin’ it for years.” He smiled and I saw the crescent of black stuff peeking over his lower lip again.

“Jed,” I said, “you got something in your mouth? Besides food?”

Jed nodded and finished chewing a mouthful of chicken. He swallowed and said, “Yeah. My chew.”

“Tobacco? You mean you keep that shit in your mouth while you eat?” John said.

“Sure. Where else am I going to put it?”

“That’s disgusting, Jed,” I said.

Jed smiled, encouraged. “I sleep with it, too.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Works great. I wake up feeling nervous? I just take a couple chaws and stash my chew back inside my lip. Sleep like a baby.”

“God,” I said. “What does your wife think of that? Like when you try to kiss her.”

“Her?” Jed said, looking sheepish. “Hell, Clarice won’t let me chew when I’m home.”

CHAPTER 30

Two good things happened on my first anniversary in Eglin. In August 1984, I got my first furlough, and Chickenhawk became a New York Times paperback best-seller.

Patience came to the prison Saturday morning. I’d changed into my set of civilian clothes kept in the administration building and was waiting for her outside. I saw some staff coming to work and started worrying, wondering if they’d think I was trying to escape. I was dressed like a civilian and armed with a letter that said I could walk around like a civilian until eleven o’clock Sunday night. But they could change their minds, couldn’t they?

Patience drove up in our Escort. I mentioned that the dashboard was dusty. A mess like that would get you demerits in prison, I said. Patience nodded with a worried look on her face. She’d spent hours cleaning it up.

We drove to a seaside motel in Fort Walton Beach, known as the “Redneck Riviera” because it was popular with tourists from southern Alabama. We spent the day making love and walking on the purest, whitest beach I’ve ever seen. I’d asked Patience to bring my camera. I had an inexplicable urge to take pictures—I really missed making photographs. I guess I wanted to absorb myself in something I could control. I had thirty-nine hours of freedom and Patience was watching me photograph sand dunes. That night, we saw Ghostbusters and ate at a posh restaurant that served worse food than I ate in prison.

At ten o’clock Sunday night, Patience drove me back home.

I walked through the administration building, changed my clothes, and, less than fifteen minutes after she dropped me off, I was once again a prisoner. I felt relaxed. I’d felt uncomfortable at the motel. You could do anything you wanted—the choices were endless and intimidating. Meals were confusing—you had to tell them what you wanted from a huge list of possibilities. You had to decide how to dress. There was no count to positively establish that you belonged anywhere. It was also deathly quiet.

Prisoners were supposed to visit in visiting rooms.

It was no surprise that my book was going to be a best-seller in paperback. Gerry Howard told me Chickenhawk would be a best-seller before it was printed because Penguin had already gotten huge orders from the two big bookstore chains, B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Penguin printed “National Bestseller” on the cover of the first paperback edition, and so it was.

At the end of the first week of publication, my cube neighbor, ex-stockbroker Walton, who subscribed to the New York Times (and the Wall Street Journal), showed me the best-seller list in the Book Review. Number five, on the nonfiction side of the list, read: “Chickenhawk, by Robert Mason. (Penguin, $3.95) The experiences of a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.” Walton said that was great, and maybe I ought to be reading some of the books he had about managing money and investing. He said, “Know what the hell you’re doing, and never trust your stockbroker. He’s trying to make money. For him.” Walton’s advice came from personal experience. He was convicted of fraud because, he said, some salesmen at his firm, an international investment company, made outrageous promises to their clients and a lot of people lost lots of money. The government claimed Walton knew what his salesmen were doing, but Walton just shrugged at that. “Salesmen will say anything, Bob. Just remember that.”

Walton was a frank kind of guy. He once admitted to me that he was really nervous about being in a prison filled with drug dealers. But, after he got to talk to them, he discovered they were just regular people, most of them.

I used to ask the inmates if they thought this was working, this incarceration, for people like us, people who had committed nonviolent crimes. Walton just shrugged. “When I get out of here, Bob, I’ll still be a rich man. My tennis game will be better; I’ll have lost twenty pounds; I own a house in Connecticut and one in Florida. You really want to hurt me? Take my money.” He smiled.

Walton’s smile said, If you can find. it. There were quite a few financial crooks in Eglin, and I asked them how money was really hidden. I didn’t have any to hide, but I figured the information might come in handy someday for a book. I had come to believe in Bill Smith’s motto: Don’t do it; write about it.

I read the description in the best-seller list over and over, not really believing it was me they were talking about. It felt like it was some kind of trick. I kept expecting someone to yell, “Surprise.” I sat on my bunk trying to comprehend what this meant, aware that I was due to go back to work in a half hour. I took Walton’s copy of the Book Review around to show a few of my friends, but I wasn’t free to celebrate. Having a book on the best-seller list had nothing to do with reality. I was a prisoner who ran the clothing room. I went back to work and wrote a letter for Baker about the status of our last clothing inventory.

Viking Penguin sent Patience on a big book tour in my place. She sent me her itinerary, and I called her at hotels all over the country. When I phoned her in Detroit, a man answered the phone, breathing hard. I said, “Who’s this?”

The voice, panting, says, “That you, Bob?”

I recognized Jerry Towler. I laughed. “What the hell you doing, Towler?”

“I told Patience to ask me if she ever needed anything, Bob. She took me up on it. Pant. Pant.” I could hear Patience laughing in the background.

I laughed and said, “Can I talk to my wife, asshole?”

Towler spoke away from the phone: “You okay?” Patience was giggling. “She’s okay. I was kinda worried. I always leave ’em gasping, you know?”

Later, when she got to San Francisco, I called her at Bill Smith’s place. Talking to Bill and Emmy from inside prison was weird. They sent me a postcard of Alcatraz which said, “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”

I walked down the jogging trail. A volleyball game was going on at the sandy court near the water. The sun was getting low; the heat on my face felt good. As I passed the mangrove marsh where the water from the bay disappeared into the woods, I saw a feral mother cat and her two kittens backlighted on a tree branch, looking like lions in the Serengeti. I’d called to them often, but they’d always ignored me. I made a squeaking noise through my pursed lips and they looked at me curiously. One of the kittens yawned. I increased my pace.

I heard a thunderous roar coming from the airfield. A F-16 fighter was making a maximum-performance takeoff. The pilot had the plane in a perfectly vertical climb, afterburners on. He was climbing at nearly fifty thousand feet per minute, a fact that was completely astounding to me. Hueys can climb at two thousand feet per minute, on a good day. The sound shook my chest. In seconds the plane was invisible at the top of a long contrail. What a thrill that pilot must feel. A minute after takeoff, the plane was gone. I saw the four thousand taxpayer families who owned the plane and, over there, the three families who’d paid for this one flight. They were all applauding.

I recognized an inmate walking toward me. His name was Jones, but everybody called him Biafra. He’d come to Eglin weighing three hundred pounds and decided that his project would be to lose weight while he was here. Eglin was known, after all, as a fat farm for crooks. Biafra was now down to two hundred. His skin hung in folds and flapped around his legs as he walked. Each day I saw him, it looked like he was deflating. You wanted to cinch him up, take up the slack somehow. Biafra puffed past me, nodding slightly, his mind calculating the number of calories expended at each step. I saw Biafra every day and watched his progress. The consensus among the inmates was that his skin would never tighten up, and that he should stop. He was, after all, a big man. A healthy weight for him might’ve been 220, but he announced he would not stop until he reached his ideal weight, 150 pounds.

I walked past the weight shack and watched the guys inside grunting and puffing, pumping weights with grim determination. Up and down. Sweat pouring, muscles rippling. I circled past the tennis courts as I looped around to reverse my track for my second lap. It was easier to reverse course than to walk through the camp, or at least it was habitual for us to do so. I stopped at the bocci courts, picked up three of the heavy balls used in the game, and tried to juggle them. I’d taught myself how to juggle in New York when I dreamed up a product, a set of bean-bag balls to learn how to juggle. I claimed the bean bags would make learning to juggle easier because if you dropped them you wouldn’t have to chase them. To prove this, I used them to teach myself to juggle. They worked, but like so many things I’ve thought of, I never pursued it. My real work in life then was to make mirrors.

Mirror maker. That seemed so long ago it had probably happened to somebody else. It was like a fantasy that I’d once been an executive in a business. Each bocci ball weighed five pounds, and I figured juggling them was good exercise for my arms. I juggled for a couple of minutes, dropped the balls on the hard-packed clay lane, and continued my walk. Halfway down the west boundary of the camp, I stopped and did as many chin-ups as I could on the chinning bar set up along the trail. The most I could do when I started was two. Now I did ten. Continuing down the trail, I felt my biceps. Soon I would be a gorilla.

I came to the white line across the service road. I walked beside it carefully, like it was a precipice. I noticed some people driving by, maybe some of my taxpayers. That was outside. I turned and walked back along the service road for my second lap.

The Steinhatchee boys, twelve fishermen who’d shown up a few months before for running pot in their boats, were sitting on benches under some trees next to Dorm Two weaving fishnets. They watched their work intently through squinted eyes in their weathered, leathery fishermen’s faces. Their line-burned, scarred, and gnarled hands knotted string into a web so complex it made you dizzy. The Steinhatchee boys were standoffish. I only overheard them a few times. They talked about how they were ever going to replace their boats the government had taken. They shipped the fishnets home for their wives to sell.

I walked along the wooden fence, down the jogging trail. You could roll under this fence; it wasn’t for security, it was a privacy fence. There was a trailer park next door. Some guys did roll under the fence at night, to visit some enterprising girls at the trailer park who entertained sex-starved, and courageous, inmates.

When my watch showed that I had been walking for the forty-five minutes I allowed myself for exercise, I stopped. I walked into the small woods beside Dorm Five and did stretching exercises and cooled down.

I walked toward the side entrance of the dorm and saw Doodle Harris, the millionaire land developer who’d arrived at Eglin the day after John and I. They’d gotten Doodle for not paying taxes. He finally did. The local paper announced it on the front page. He’d paid the half million dollars the government wanted, thinking he’d made a deal, but the IRS threw him into jail anyway. His wife and his partners showed up every week in his Rolls-Royce, and they spent the whole visit going over Doodle’s plans. He claimed he’d be out in a few weeks, didn’t really unpack for a month. Now, a year later, his confidence had disappeared. Doodle looked very despondent sitting on the park bench beside Dorm Five. He nodded, but he was lost in worry. I’d heard him talking on the phone to his “people” and I knew he was trying to lock up a deal on a piece of beach property. The deal wasn’t going well, according to what I heard, and Harris wasn’t able to get out and kick some ass to make it work. I went inside to my cube.

Walton, my stockbroker neighbor, and Doug Norton, the inmate tennis pro, were in the aisle with a tennis racket. Norton was showing Walton the importance of a follow-through with the racket. Norton had a client list of about ten inmates he was teaching to play tennis. Like Walton had said, he wanted to improve his game. I watched them, interested, while I undressed. I’d tried playing a few times with Tony Abruzzo. He kept telling me, “No, Bob, the idea is to hit the fucking ball over the net.” I smiled. Tony, at sixty-five, could slaughter me in tennis. I watched Norton show Walton how to hold a racket for a backhand. I stripped down, wrapped myself in a towel, and went to the showers.

I always used the same shower stall, and I noticed that so did most people. Inmates would actually wait if “their” stall was busy. I think it must have been a small way to personalize our lives here. I liked my stall because it had a shower head that delivered a thick stream of water which felt like a massage. There was no worry about running out of hot water at the camp, and I spent at least fifteen minutes letting the water stream beat on my shoulders and neck. While I basked in the steam, I noticed plastered on the tile wall a new soggy fuck-book foldout page. There was a different one every day. Today it was Nancy. Nancy was wet and wrinkled on the tiles, but she was still smiling as she exposed herself to viewers who needed to see one again. I wondered if she knew where her picture would end up when she posed for the shot. Probably. She seemed to be thinking: Here it is, jerkoffs. I tried not to pay attention to Nancy. The pose was brazen, vulgar. Cheap titillation. I faced the shower and lathered my hair with Johnson’s Baby shampoo and things went normally until the shower stream hit low. I could feel myself stiffen. I looked down. I was standing out like a coat peg. It was really impressive to me that I could consciously be offended by pictures like Nancy while my body was clearly in love. I wanted to be home where I could give Patience some loving hints like: “Feel like fooling around?” But I wasn’t. I wouldn’t be home for a year. I felt myself getting stiffer. Apparently Nancy was plenty good enough for my dick. I rinsed off the shampoo and stood back and watched the stream of water hitting me. In two minutes, I went off like a gun. Well, that was sex for another three or four days. The average was three or four days, at the end of which time I must have had testosterone saturating every cell in my body. I had sexy dreams like I did in high school and sexual urges so strong I could think of nothing else until I did something about it. I would be a failure as a monk; or did monks take a lot of showers, too?

I soaked in the steam awhile longer and then turned the water off. I thought, Thanks, Nancy. I hope it was as good for you as it was for me, and stepped out to towel off.

I went back to my cube and put on a clean set of clothes. All my clothes were new—as you would expect of the guy who runs the clothing room. I put on a new pair of pants and a sweatshirt I’d bought at the commissary and stood for a minute, watching the section buzzing with inmates, deciding how I’d spend my evening. The section had a homey quality about it. I knew most of the twenty-five men there, and they all knew me. It was home.

I unlocked my locker and got out my big radio and the earphones. I hung the radio on a hook on the partition above the head of my cot. I had made the hook with coat-hanger wire so the radio was up high enough to get the PBS station in Pensacola.

The loudspeaker called an inmate to the control room. That meant a urine test. It was random. They called up two or three men every night. Some of the inmates who had been here a few years said the piss tests really cut down on the pot smoking. Not like the good old days, they said, when the guys had parties in the woods next to Dorm Five where Tarzan fell out of the tree.

I listened to the radio no matter what I was doing. Sometimes I answered mail. I was getting about fifty letters a week from readers, most of whom, I was surprised to know, weren’t Vietnam veterans. I read them all, and tried to answer them, too, but I was falling behind. I got a thousand letters from readers while I was at Eglin.

Sometimes ideas for new inventions popped into my mind, and I made drawings. I sent an attorney friend of mine, Tony LoPucki, in Gainesville, my idea for a quartz wristwatch that didn’t need batteries. LoPucki, who used to be a patent attorney, liked my ideas, but he thought the world was doing okay using batteries in their watches. Fine. The only reason LoPucki talked to me at all was that when I first met him, I showed him my scheme for three-dimensional television. I got the idea looking at the display of a quartz wristwatch, oddly enough. I’d experimented with 3-D movies in New York. I exposed single frames of a still life in an 8mm movie camera, moving the camera left or right for each frame. I projected this film and tried looking at it through a spinning disk with one hole near the edge. The idea was that if the disk spun at the right speed, then my left eye would see a left image in one frame of my film, and then, if everything was timed right, my right eye would see the next frame, a right image. Persistence of vision, I figured, would create a 3-D picture. I mounted the disk on a hand drill, and by varying the speed, I got it to work. But I couldn’t figure an easy way to synchronize the disk with the flickering left and right images. The blinking seconds on the liquid crystal display of a watch gave me an idea: Wear glasses with liquid-crystal lenses. Then send a signal from the TV to the glasses, and the lenses could be switched alternately from opaque to clear in synch with the thirty images per second on the TV screen. I had no idea how to build something like this, so I sat on the idea for a year before I met LoPucki. LoPucki was going to Washington anyway, so he said he’d do a search free, because he knew I was poor. He came back very impressed. The idea was patented, yes, but only three months before. I didn’t know where these ideas came from, but they weren’t coming tonight.

I decided to read. I selected a book out of the dozen or so I had on the shelf over the built-in desk. I picked out The First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

I’d finished At Play in the Fields of the Lord, by Peter Matthiessen, a book Bill Smith sent me. Smith had been sending me books to improve my essentially illiterate background. So had Larry Heinemann. Heinemann sent me Life on the Mississippi because he said I wrote like Samuel Clemens. Heinemann was gracious as hell. At Play was stunning, and I wondered how Matthiessen ever got to be so smart. His writing is like poetry, every page of it. The book was written in 1965, while I was living in a pup tent in Vietnam. I missed it, though I probably wouldn’t have read it had Bill not sent it. At Eglin, in addition to the technical books I read—layman physics stuff about fundamental particles, black holes, artificial intelligence, computers, and so on—I read a lot of novels, hoping that some of what makes writing a novel possible would rub off on me.

I put on my headphones and tuned in the classical music station. That made the rumble and rush of the crowded dorm fade to the background. I read.

The irony of The First Circle, for me, was that it took place in a sharashka, a minimum-security prison in Russia. I got lost in the life of Nerzhin and the other well-educated inmates of the sharashka because Solzhenitsyn made me feel I was there with them. Naturally, you can’t learn how to create stories like Solzhenitsyn or Matthiessen do by copying their writing techniques, but you can see grace in action and learn a few nuts and bolts about how they handle the mechanics of the presentation. All it took was time to do careful reading. I had plenty of time. I was now around day three hundred and ninety. I had another two hundred and ten to go. Lots of time.

Just before ten, the guys who’d been watching television came wandering back from the TV room to be in their cubes for the count. I put my book away and turned out my desk lamp.

After count, a lot of the inmates returned to the TV room. We had cable, and they wanted to see The Hitchhiker, a popular program on HBO.

Now the thing I dreaded the most happened. Someone whose voice had become a nightly torment got on the phone in the phone booth that was conveniently located ten feet from my bed. I covered my head with my pillow, but I could hear every word.

The guy on the phone had a problem. He’d said his wife could date while he was inside. I heard him explaining this to his buddy one day in the chow line. He said, “She gets lonely, and I trust my friends.” His friend looked at him incredulously and the guy quickly added, “Well, hell, it doesn’t wear out, you know,” and laughed to show his friend he was kidding.

Tonight, as usual, he talked loudly, as though he were home instead of in a prison bedroom where twenty-five men were trying to sleep. I heard: “Yeah, Sam’s okay. Sam’s a good guy. Where’d you go?”

“The Tin Lizzy? What’d you do?”

Pause. I could only imagine what his wife was saying. I was hoping she’d talk long enough for me to get to sleep.

“Yeah? You never wanted to dance with me.”

Pause. I pressed my hands against my ears.

“Me? I dance. I love to dance.”

I was groaning under my pillow. I couldn’t stand it. I’d been plotting to take the phone apart and throw the little microphone in the mouthpiece into the swamps where the cats lived. A phone repair inmate told me they had a problem with that: guys were throwing them away for the same reason I wanted to—peace. The idiot talked. And talked.

“Sure. When I get home, I’ll take you dancing.”

Pause. I was so happy for him. Dancing? My, my.

“So what’d you do after Tin Lizzy?”

He took her home?

“Took you home? I know he took you home. What did you do when you got home? That’s what I want to know.”

He kissed her?

“What?” the idiot says real loud. I heard “Shutthefuck up!” from somewhere in the section.

The idiot ignored the request. He said, “Yeah. Then what?”

More than a good night kiss?

“Yeah. Then what?” His voice was changing, higher in pitch. He listened for a long time, almost long enough for me to drop off.

“What?” the idiot yelled suddenly. I jerked back from the brink of sleep and heard, “You sucked his dick? You sucked Sam’s dick?”

A pause while idiot’s wife, Mrs. Idiot, explained.

“Sure, I said you could date my friends. When you had to. I know I said that. But I didn’t say you could suck their dicks! That’s personal!”

I heard a loud crash. Someone had thrown a work boot at the phone booth.

The idiot lowered his voice so only those of us lucky enough to be right next to the fucking phone could hear. “Did he come? In your mouth?” he said softly.

“Enough!” I groaned. I got out of bed and went to the phone booth. “Hey,” I said. “You mind? I’m trying to sleep.”

The idiot said, “Wait a minute, hon,” put his hand over the mouthpiece, and said to me, “This phone is for anybody to use.”

“Yeah, I know. But most people phone when most people are awake, you know? This is bullshit. Get off the phone.”

“You want to try to make me?” said the idiot loudly. He was stupid, but he was very large.

A voice behind me said, “I’ll fucking make you.” I turned around. It was my neighbor across the aisle. He was a former professional football player who’d got caught selling cocaine to his fellow players. He was a linebacker. Very big.

The idiot was intimidated. He nodded and said quietly into the phone, “Look, honey. I’ll call you back from another phone, okay?” He paused. “No, I don’t. I understand. You know I love you. I’ll—”

The linebacker, who looked as tall as the phone booth, stepped up close to the idiot. The guy looked up, nodded quickly, said “I’ll call you back in a minute,” and hung up the phone. We both watched him leave. The linebacker said, “Is that guy as stupid as he sounds?”

“Yes. Every bit as stupid as he sounds. Possibly he’s a vegetable.”

Luckily, I fell asleep before the next call.

CHAPTER 31

One of the guys who worked the clothing room line was called Professor because he read all the time and talked about philosophy. He was a black guy and a cripple. His ankles were fused, for some reason I forget, and he hobbled when he walked. I lent him The Holographic Paradigm, a book about the mind as an illusion that I could barely follow. He loved it and we became friends.

When it was lunchtime three of us from the clothing room, Professor and John and I, usually walked to the mess hall together. Since we were with Professor, John and I had to walk slowly so he could keep up. One day Tony Abruzzo came up behind us and said, “What the hell’s the holdup here?” I turned around and saw Tony grinning and shaking his head at Professor’s pitiful gait. Suddenly Tony reached out and shoved Professor off the sidewalk. “Get out of the way!” he yelled. Professor stumbled off the sidewalk, tottering, barely able to keep his balance. Tony turned to him as he passed us and said, “Professor. You know what your trouble is?”

Professor, amazingly, was laughing. He said, “What?”

“Not only are you a nigger, you’re a fucking cripple.”

I was horrified, but Professor started giggling like a kid. I still couldn’t figure out how Tony did it.

For some reason, I often ended up in line at the mess hall standing next to an attorney from New York City. Mike usually told me how he had the government on the run with all his fancy legal maneuvers. Mike had robbed his clients of money they invested with him and took the position that they should’ve known better. Today Mike was talking about a hot new business scheme he had for when he busted out of here.

“You hear about how they can implant a fertilized egg from one woman to another?”

“I’ve read that, yes,” I said. “Like they do with cattle, right?” The line moved ahead and I took a step. Mike followed.

“Right. But with people? Wow! There’s a fortune in this,” Mike said.

“Yeah, I guess a lot of women will have that done. Infertile couples, and all that.”

“Naw. That’s not what I mean. There’s some money that way, too, but you have to be a doctor to cash in on that. What I want to do is even more brilliant. Attorney work.”

I asked how an attorney could cash in on fetal transplants.

Mike grinned. “Simple. You buy fertilized eggs from beautiful blond couples, you know? Good stock; they make just the kind of kids that are in demand. Then you take these eggs to someplace like Haiti and hire native women to carry the fetus to term. Get it?”

“Black women give birth to blond babies?”

“Right! Do you have any idea what blond babies are worth on the adoption market?”

I shook my head.

“Hundred, two hundred thousand. That’s what. You use these niggers like ovens. They hatch the kids; I arrange the adoptions. Millions.”

I stared at Mike. He was smiling like he’d discovered how to turn lead into gold. I think he was a sociopath.

“What do you think?”

“Millions,” I said, nodding.

“Right!” Mike said, laughing.

When we got into the mess hall, I made sure we were in separate serving lines.

I didn’t see Mike in the chow line for a few days. I heard from John Tillerman, who worked as a clerk in administration, that they’d sent him out for “diesel therapy.” Mike had succeeded in getting a judge in New York to review his case and the judge called him before his court. That happened now and then, and the Bureau of Prisons had busses traveling all over the country transferring prisoners from prison to prison and sometimes delivering them to court dates.

If you were not a troublemaker like Mike, they usually gave you a legal furlough and let you fly to wherever you had to go. Mike had pissed off too many people; the prison elected to send him by bus to New York. Normally that might take a few days. But when diesel therapy was prescribed, the route was not direct. They switched you from one bus to another, making your trip an arduous zigzag tour of the whole country with extended visits at county jails while you waited for the next connection. John said they’d put Mike on the bus two days ago to make his court date in six weeks. Mike would be spending his days on a prison bus, in handcuffs, his nights in one squalid county jail hole after another. I figured it was justice.

At work one day, we heard that Tony Abruzzo had a heart attack while playing tennis. They shipped him to Lexington, to the Bureau of Prison’s main hospital. We heard he was doing okay, but he’d miss the big talent show, the Eglin Frolics.

The inmates had built a stage across the salad bar and set some patio clamp lights up all around it. It was standing room only when I got there. I sat on the low serving-line wall with John Tillerman. Everybody was hooting and waving, having a great time. I saw Red the counterfeiter sitting with Joe the materials engineer. Red told everybody he was here for making his own money. He owned a print shop and got curious about how they printed money one day. He went to a bank and, as a businessman, asked them how he could detect counterfeit bills. They told him how and gave him a pamphlet about it. Red took this information and started making money that’d pass. His money wasn’t a work of art, he said. The bills all had the same serial number. He claimed it didn’t matter. The secret, Red said, was to condition the money so it looked circulated. He’d come up with just the right mixture of dirt and oil and stones that he dumped into a washing machine with his freshly minted hundred-dollar bills. A couple of hours later, he said, the bills looked like they’d been in circulation for years. He sold this handmade money to people for twenty to forty cents on the dollar and made real money. He told me he knew he’d be caught eventually, but he’d been saving up for it.

I seldom got to see everybody in one place like this. Joe the engineer listened to Red for a while and then turned to argue with Chuck, another engineer. Chuck and Joe had fundamental disagreements about stuff I didn’t understand. Each one thought the other was a quack. Joe was in materials; Chuck was a mechanical engineer. Chuck was also designing an airplane. I had seen the model he made in the woodshop, and it looked like it would work as a full-sized plane. He was having his kid run computer programs at home to design the airfoils for the wings. He was not joking. He said he was going to build it when he got out, and I had no doubt he would.

The show was late to start. The inmates were loud, yapping happily. I looked around for more people I knew. I knew a lot of inmates and I knew all their stories. They came to me with them. That guy, sitting two guys down from Red. Danny? Danny something. He shouldn’t be here. He should get an award for what he did.

Danny was a pilot, in his late twenties. He had been approached by two guys who asked him if he wanted to make a hundred thousand dollars for one flight. Danny was nervous, but he listened. They said, “Look, we’re not bullshitters with some junky plane. We have a DC-6 that’s like new. We need a good pilot and we hear you’re great. Take it for a ride, check it out, see what kind of equipment we have.” Danny did. He told me the plane was in first-class shape. When he landed, the two guys gave him ten thousand in cash as a down payment.

Danny went home, told his wife what he was thinking of doing. They stayed up all night talking about it and the next morning he found the two guys and gave them their money back. No deal, Danny told them, something I should’ve done.

A year later Danny was arrested. The two guys were DEA agents. Danny’s crime was that he failed to inform the authorities about the offer these men made. That’s conspiracy. He got five years.

The guys were chanting, “Start the show! Start the show!” The hacks were smiling, getting into the spirit of the thing. I saw Simpson, my old boss from my landscape days. He was not smiling—looked a little anxious, in fact. He and I had become friendly since he was no longer my boss. He looked at another hack seriously, but the hack just smiled. The place was looking like a riot to Simpson, I guess.

Simpson had come to Eglin from Marion Prison. Marion is the only prison in the system with a level six section. The most vicious, the vilest, the most heinous criminals our society produces all live in perpetual lock-down in cages at the level six section at Marion. Simpson once told me he still had a hard time seeing inmates wandering around loose. He’d jump if you came up behind him.

Simpson was on a detail one day at level six with two other guards. They were to escort a completely insane murderer to his daily shower. The inmates at level six get an hour a day out of their cells for a walk in the halls and a shower, all under heavy guard. The guards are not armed because weapons could be taken away and used against them. This murderer, Simpson said, used to call the guards filthy names the whole time, but they ignored him. Part of the job. This day, however, the guy had a surprise. He was standing in his cell holding a towel wrapped around his waist, ready for his shower. They let him out. They did not search him. As the guy walked by one of the guards, Simpson’s friend, he dropped the towel, exposing a three-foot piece of broomstick. He’d sharpened one end of the stick, and in one blurred move, Simpson said, he jammed the stick up into his friend’s belly with both hands. Simpson said he shoved it up deeper and deeper, forcing it up into his friend’s chest while all the guards beat him wildly with their clubs. He said the guy didn’t notice, just kept screaming and shoving that stick deeper. When Simpson’s friend collapsed in the hall, a bloody mess, the guy stood up straight and laughed like crazy. “Guards zero! Inmate two!” the guy screamed. He’d killed a guard once before. There wasn’t a federal death penalty for murder then, and the guy was already in for a couple of lives. They couldn’t do a thing about it. Simpson said he had to go tell his friend’s wife. I understood why Simpson was looking anxious. I wouldn’t want his job for anything. The hacks at Eglin had it easy, but they would eventually rotate to real prisons.

The inmate band—we had all sorts of musicians here—played an introduction. The chaplain’s assistant was the master of ceremonies. The first act was an inmate who played the guitar beautifully. We heard a singer, watched a tap dancer, and then a comedian who did impersonations of the hacks.

The last act. The chaplain’s assistant announced, “And now, ladies (a few female staff were present) and gentlemen—” he paused while an inmate drummer who had missed the cue started a drumroll, “the luscious, the vivacious, the beautiful—Coquette!” A single spotlight flashed on the stage. The band launched into a saucy bump-and-grind tune and into the spotlight leapt Ernest the black homosexual. I know I said they didn’t allow gay guys at Eglin, but I think they tolerated Ernest because he was just so damn open about it that nobody felt threatened. Ernest was always on. He was more effeminate than most women, and I’d seen him moan at guys he thought were attractive. The rednecks thought he was kind of bizarre, but they didn’t kill him—a testimony to Ernest’s charm.

Ernest did the best striptease act I’ve ever seen. He was wearing a mop for a wig and a costume of filmy cheesecloth. He whirled around with the music, swishing, tossing the veils into the crowd until he was down to a gold lame brief. It was so convincing, I forgot Ernest was a man. The crowd went wild.

Ernest won the talent show by a big margin.

I spent the summer of 1959 in Havana, living with a Cuban family. I saw Fidel Castro there and met Camilo Cienfuegos, a senior general under Castro whom Castro later had killed. I met General Cienfuegos by running past his armed guards when I saw his helicopter landing at the house he’d commandeered across the street from where I stayed. When I got close to the helicopter, I saw Cienfuegos first look surprised and then laugh. I was bounding, barefooted, across his huge yard with his armed guards in hot pursuit. He held up his hand and the guards dropped back. He walked up to me carrying a .45-caliber pistol he fitted with a stock and a long banana clip and asked me, in perfect English (he’d gone to school at the University of Miami), who I was.

I told him I was living with the Uriartes across the street, and I loved helicopters. He laughed and let me walk around and look at his chopper. Then he had one of his guards come over and take our picture together with my camera. After he left, the guards, who were called barbados, became my friends because I had shown such courage. For a boy, they said, I had the cojones of a man, which is a terrific compliment for an adolescent boy.

I knew Cubans, you see, and I liked Cubans, so it was a painful disappointment to me that they were the most unpopular ethnic group in Eglin.

These Cubans were mostly drug smugglers or money launderers, two of the more lucrative industries that have sprung up around the drug business our drug laws have created, and most of them had grown up in Miami. Some of them brought bizarre religious practices like Santeria that involved sacrificing especially trained white doves, and some of the poorer Cubans made sure there was a glass of water under their beds at night to ward off evil spirits. I’d seen none of this in Cuba. These habits added a threatening element to Cuban culture from the Anglos’ point of view. The real problem, though, as the Anglos in camp saw it, was simply that the Cubans were rude. Anglos are seldom rude, even if they are about to kill you. Cubans at Eglin were thought of as loud and pushy. In our crowded living conditions, the Cubans would often pack ten of their friends into one cube and have a noisy party over espresso and cookies. That produced much friction. Anyone making a complaint to them met with surly glares and loud advice on what sorts of things they might shove up their assholes.

There were few fights in Eglin because the penalty for fighting was that all participants in a fight were shipped off to higher-level prisons regardless of who started it. The one exception I knew about was one famous fight in Dorm Three just before I moved to Dorm Five. I didn’t see it but the story got around. A hillbilly from Tennessee, Sammy McGuire, had asked the three Cubans next to his bunk who were having a meeting after lights out if they minded terribly shutting the fuck up. The Cubans got mad and threatened to put the hillbilly’s lights out if he didn’t mind his own fucking business. This usually worked because, as I said, everybody goes to a real prison who’s in a fight, and Eglin is a camp full of wimps. But Sammy McGuire didn’t seem to be impressed. Since it was dark, no one could see the action, but the result was three injured Cubans, one of whom had to be treated at the infirmary.

To the Cubans’ credit, they refused to admit that there had been a fight, claiming they’d all fallen down in the shower. The prison officials, having no witnesses or confessions (after an all-night grilling), were forced to accept the story, but the inmates knew what happened. McGuire became a hero among the Anglos. Even the Cubans respected him.

I had very little to do with the Cubans because they were so hard to get along with. The only one I talked to was a dentist in my section named Antonio. One Sunday afternoon, while I lay in bed reading, a group of Cubans were just outside the dorm, about ten feet from my cube (all major noise in camp was ten feet from my cube; only the airplanes were farther away), talking loudly and playing their radio. The windows were open because the weather was perfect. I tried to ignore the music, even put my headphones on, but it was really loud. I endured for a half hour and finally got mad. I went outside and asked one of the guys, Eduardo, who lived down at the end of my aisle, if they might consider turning the radio down.

Eduardo stared at me sullenly and said, “No hablo Ingles. I don’t speak English.”

Well, of course he did. I’d talked to him a couple of times.

“C’mon, Eduardo. It’s way too loud. I can’t think. Besides, you aren’t even allowed to use a radio without earphones.”

“No hablo Ingles,” Eduardo said. His two friends snickered and looked at me like I was from the Other Side.

I said, “Eduardo, por favor,” and held my hands over my ears.

Eduardo just glared at me as if I had just suggested that his sister fucked donkeys.

I felt my heart pounding in my ears and I was beginning to get into a rage. Didn’t anybody understand the importance of quiet in this fucking place? I mean, we had rules here! I went inside and found my friend Antonio. I told him about Eduardo, and he volunteered to act as my envoy. I watched through the window as Antonio explained to them my side of the issue. Eduardo told Antonio to mind his own business. Antonio came back inside and shrugged. If a Cuban couldn’t make them shut up, then the only people who could were the hacks. However, going to a hack about this kind of problem was worse than the problem; it just wasn’t ethical to rat on an inmate, even if the inmate was a total asshole. I took a walk.

As the population of Cubans grew, so did incidents between them and the Anglos. Cop-outs flooded the counselors’ offices. Even George, the sporting goods felon—the meek and apathetic soul I used to tend grounds with—lost it one night and got into a fight with two Cubans in Dorm Four. A hack saw it, and George and the Cubans were shipped to the federal prison at Tallahassee. That fight and the continuing complaints caused the hacks to cruise the dorms more frequently. They were breaking up the Cubans’ parties, which made the Cubans resent the Anglos even more. A real schism was developing and peace in our little crook farm was jeopardized.

I had cooled down about the radio incident, but when I passed Eduardo in the aisle and tried to be friendly, he just glared at me and said nothing. My transgression, asking for peace and quiet, was not forgivable.

Three weeks after the radio incident, Antonio came to me one night and said he’d heard that the prison was going to ship Cubans, lots of them, out of Eglin. He wanted to know if I’d heard anything about it. I hadn’t. However, the rumors persisted and grew to the extent that the Cubans sent a spokesman to the new warden. Superintendent Honsted had been sent to open a new prison a few months before. The Cubans requested that the warden meet with them outside the administration building to talk about the rumor. On a Friday evening, the warden did. He told the Cubans he’d heard the rumor, too, but that it was only a rumor and they had nothing to worry about. They believed him.

When I woke up Saturday morning, Eduardo was gone. So was Antonio. So was every Cuban in our dorm. At the mess hall, I learned that nearly every Cuban in camp had been rounded up at three in the morning by hacks carrying shotguns (which is amazing, since hacks never carry weapons in a prison unless there’s a riot or something). They were already on buses going, it was claimed, to Atlanta. Being sent to Atlanta Federal Prison, I was told by people who’d been there, is the same as being sent to hell—it’s huge, overcrowded with crazy and pissed-off Marielitos who chant and scream twenty-four hours a day, demanding their freedom, creating a literal bedlam. As much as I didn’t like Eduardo, I wouldn’t wish Atlanta on anyone, especially a pot smuggler who was considered harmless enough to be sent to Eglin.

At the visiting room, there were a lot of Cuban women crying and screaming at the guards, pleading to know where their husbands were. It was sad to see.

The few remaining Cubans were noticeably quiet. They no longer gathered in the cubes and even responded positively to the normal requests for quiet that came up every evening. The consensus among the Anglos was that the warden did the right thing shipping those forty or so Cubans. This action didn’t establish a ban on Cubans coming to Eglin; they continued arriving a few at a time and the population slowly began to rebuild. But it took a long time to reach critical density again.

I began having migraine attacks twice a week after my book became a best-seller. Maybe watching it move up and down the list for fourteen weeks made me tense. The clinic had brought in an injectable version of Cafergot for me. It only worked some of the time, and I was getting depressed. When I wasn’t having migraines, I was having strange pains in my head. I went to the clinic and complained. Shouldn’t they check out my head to see how many tumors there were?

They agreed to send me to a civilian doctor in Niceville.

A week later, I got into a blue Air Force van driven by an inmate named Jennings, a veteran of World War II, who’d gotten caught trying to smuggle some pot in his airplane. I had not left the camp except for one visit to the base hospital for my initial physical and my overnight furlough with Patience. It was weird to me that Jennings just waved to the base guards as he drove through the gate. In minutes we were cruising among civilian traffic on our way to town. Think of it, two federal prisoners driving alone among real people. The fact was astounding to me.

“I do it every day, Bob. Everybody knows who we are,” Jennings said. “We’re everywhere. A lot of inmates are drivers; we got guys who go the officer’s club every day to take care of the club; we got guys who work at the golf course, the yacht club, you name it. Everywhere.”

“I just can’t shake the feeling that a cop’s going to pull us over and take us back to prison,” I said.

Jennings laughed.

Twenty minutes later, Jennings pulled into a parking lot in front of a medical center. “Here you are. I’ll come back in an hour,” Jennings said.

I got out and watched Jennings drive down the street. I saw an elderly couple get out of a car and walk into the building. The woman smiled at me and I smiled back, feeling very out of place. I read the name on the note they’d given me at the camp and looked up the office. I walked inside. I figured as soon as people saw my blue mechanics’ uniform they’d start shrieking and stand up on the chairs or something, but nothing happened. I went to the window and told them my name and who I was supposed to see.

“Robert Mason,” said the nurse. “From the prison?”

“That’s right,” I said quietly, trying not to alarm anybody.

The nurse smiled and told me to have a seat. The doctor would see me in a minute.

Dr. Johnson, a neurologist, asked me a bunch of questions and then told me he knew all about migraines and how much they really hurt because he was a doctor and also because he had migraine attacks, too. “I became a specialist in migraines because I get them, and I hate them. I’ve been looking for a cure for years.”

That meant he hadn’t found it yet. Dr. Johnson got out a picture of a human head sliced in half and for the next half hour described to me the nature of the ailment. His descriptions of the symptoms matched mine perfectly. He told me that the warning symptoms almost always happen the same way, and the trick was to take the Cafergot as soon as I felt the first twinge. That didn’t always work, he said. When it didn’t, lying still in the dark with a cold compress on your head was the only practical answer. They could, he said, give me narcotics, but my being at a prison camp probably excluded that possibility. When he wrapped up the examination, he said, “You the same guy who wrote Chickenhawk?”

“Yessir. That’s me.”

“That’s one helluva book. My son-in-law was a door gunner over there. Didn’t really understand what he went through until I read your book—he won’t talk about it, you know? Thanks for writing it. They treating you okay at the camp?”

“Yessir. If you have to be in prison, Eglin’s the place to be.”

Johnson laughed. “Good. Listen, Mr. Mason, I predict that when you get out of there, these migraine attacks will stop. They usually come when you’re under a lot of stress.”

I checked out at the nurses’ window and they just said good-bye. Didn’t have to pay anything, taxpayer’s treat. When I turned around, I saw Jennings sitting in the waiting room reading a magazine. He looked up. “Man. What was wrong with you? You’ve been in there over an hour.”

“Doc said I have to have a brain transplant,” I said.

On the way back to camp, we spotted a blue Air Force pickup truck parked at a convenience store. Two inmates were sitting in the cab drinking Cokes. “You want to stop and get something?”

“We can do that?”

“Well, not really,” said Jennings. “But they don’t hassle you if you don’t abuse it.”

“You can stop if you want,” I said. “But I don’t want anything. I have everything I need at camp.”

In a half hour I was home, feeling relieved to be there.

A month after his heart attack, Tony Abruzzo came back. He was a little thinner, but he had a tan, and he was filled with stories about life at Lexington. “The place is co-ed,” Tony said. “Can you imagine that? I didn’t know they had such a thing in the prison system. It was disgusting.”

“What d’you mean?” John said. “I’d like having some girls around to talk to.”

“John, these women are not interested in talking. All they want to do is fuck.”

“So what’s wrong with that?” John said.

“These girls? You don’t know where they’ve been, John. I wouldn’t fuck them with your dick.”

John laughed and said, “How do they get the chance? They all aren’t in the same dorms, right?”

“Right. They have separate dorms, but everything else is shared. You’re allowed to walk around and hold hands. You can hug and stuff. You can go to the movies together—” Tony stopped to laugh and said, “I’m in the movie, right? The Godfather—God, was that one great movie—and this girl comes crawling along the row—you know, between your knees and the seats?—asking guys if they want a blowjob. She comes to me and I say, ‘Get out of here!’”

“Right, Tony.”

“Right, John, you schmuck. I can hear you now. ‘Oh,’” Tony mimics John in falsetto, “‘she wants to give me a blowjob. She loves me.’ Jesus! Me, I don’t need whatever she’s passing around. She’s crawling around on her hands and knees giving blowjobs to perfect strangers for cigarettes,” Tony said.

“She gave a blowjob for a cigarette?”

“No, John, this is a high-class girl, someone you’d respect. She charges a whole pack of cigarettes.”

John said, “Man, she’s got a real smoking addiction.”

The back room crew laughed.

“And that’s not all,” Tony said, grinning. He was enjoying the story. “These people are fucking all over the place. It’s like I’m in a zoo during a rut. These women have nothing else to do. They’ve figured it out. They sew their zippers in along the inseams of their pants, you know; not vertical like normal, but along—” Tony put his finger six inches down on the inseam of one leg of his pants and followed the seam across his crotch and back down the other inseam, “that way, sideways.”

“Why?” John asked.

“’Cause they don’t wear panties and they can unzip that zipper and then when they’re hugging their boyfriend, he can just slip it in. When a guard’s around, they’re not moving, just leaning up against a wall, hugging. But the guy’s plugged in. The guards think they’re just making out. When the guard leaves, the guy starts humping, real slow. Pretty soon, they’re fucking their brains out. I saw this with my own eyes! I couldn’t believe it! Fuck, fuck, fuck. That’s all they do at Lexington. Animals.”

Who knows if it was true? It was exactly what we wanted to hear.

We heard they were coming a week before they got there. People were talking in the chow line. Four guys were coming to Eglin. A sheriff from a county jail and three of his deputies. Rumor said these guys were convicted of depriving a couple of black guys of their civil rights by beating them to death at the jail they ran.

Wait! Everybody was saying. You can’t let murderers into Eglin! This is a nice camp! A hack told me the bureau was sending them here because they knew they’d be killed in a real prison.

The day they arrived, the Eglin wimps were prepared. The guys in the clothing room made sure that their pants were short enough to look like knickers, their shirts were too small to button, and their shoes were the oldest, foulest pairs they could find. The new prisoners walked into prison looking like they’d fallen into a vat of some chemical that shrank all their clothes and rotted their boots. They also looked very nervous. By dinner they couldn’t go anywhere without somebody pointing them out. One black guy ran up to the ex-sheriff in a dorm hallway. “You like to kill niggers? Well, kill me, motherfucker!” he yelled, jabbing his chest with his thumb. “C’mon. Kill me!” He glared at the ex-sheriff, and the ex-sheriff shrank up against the wall, petrified. The black guy shook his head in disgust and said, “Damn!” The ex-sheriff slinked away.

The ex-sheriff had nothing to worry about. Nobody at Eglin would actually hurt him and his deputies. We pecked at them, true, but it was like being pecked by ducks. For a few weeks the former cops couldn’t get new clothes or shoes until the staff came over and made us issue decent stuff. Okay, the clothing room gang said, they have good clothes. Try wearing them! Ha! They sprinkled fiberglass insulation into their underwear and “lost” the rest of their laundry. Every time their laundry came back from the base, the clothing room team just sent it right back. After a month of petty harassment, everybody lost interest. Eglin inmates were a real disappointment if you were looking for really nasty crooks. Eventually the cops were left alone. Nobody would talk to them, but they weren’t harassed, either. They were lucky.

Actually, I think there was another murderer at Eglin, but I can’t be sure. He was there for income tax evasion. Jules worked internationally, knew a lot about hiding money. He seemed a very friendly man, knowledgeable about intriguing criminal matters and willing to talk. I enjoyed our conversations. I mentioned something about how hard it was to get the seed money for the kinds of banking crimes with which Jules was involved.

“It’s not hard, Bob.” Jules said. We were walking beside the beach, on the jogging trail.

“C’mon,” I said. “You say you need a few million dollars. How can a person get that kind of money together?”

Jules nodded, looked at me seriously. “If you are willing to do what has to be done, then it is easy.”

“Yes?” I said. The way he said it made me wonder if I wanted to hear the rest.

“Yes. I’ve been busted before, Bob. Ten years ago, when I got out of prison, I was flat broke. A year later I had five million dollars in a bank in Austria.”

I laughed nervously. “What’d you do? Rob a bank?”

“Exactly,” Jules said.

“C’mon,” I said. “That never works.”

“It is child’s play. Do you want to know how?” Jules and I were at the lonely stretch of the trail, beside the swamp. The feral cats watched us. Jules’s tone of voice made my skin crawl.

“Why would you tell me? I might write it down someday.”

“Fine. Do it. You don’t know if I’m lying.”

“Are you lying?”

“No.”

I shrugged. There is no way out of a cycle like this. It’s an example of a self-referential conundrum I’d been reading about, like: “This sentence is false.”

“You walk into the bank, after you have found out who is the president, and—”

“You’re telling me how?”

“Yes. It’s part of the real world, Bob. In the real world power rules. Powerful people take what they want.”

I saw John Tillerman in the weight shack. He was bench pressing a very large set of weights. He didn’t see me. “You promise me you’re lying, and I’ll listen.”

“Everything I am telling you is a lie,” Jules said.

“Tell me.”

“You know who the banker is, you know where he lives. You have grown a full but distinguished beard, dyed your hair. As you walk in the front door of the bank, your two partners are inside his house, with his family. When the secretary asks your business, you give her an envelope to give to the president, an envelope with a picture of his wife and kids. A minute later the secretary says he will see you.

“When you are sitting together, in his office, discussing how much money you want, you suggest he call home. He does. One of your partners answers.”

We passed the bocci courts. We were once again skirting the swampy side of the camp. Long shadows of sunset enclosed us.

“The banker is not a power person. When your partner answers, the banker is pissing in his pants. He makes a couple of calls. A clerk delivers the money, gives it to the ‘important client’ in the office. You pack it carefully in your briefcase.”

“What keeps him from calling the police when you leave?”

“He leaves with you. He is going to lunch with the important client.”

“Where do you go?”

Jules smiled slightly. “Fishing.”

I nodded, quickly. Why did I know what that meant? “The family?”

“Nothing. You are not a brute. They know nothing. They have been with two men wearing ski masks for a couple of hours.”

I nodded. We walked in silence.

“It is shocking to you? This real world?”

“I’ve seen people killed. Women and children have died because of me. That’s real. I’ve just never met anyone who’d kill in cold blood, except in war—that’s not… well, it has a purpose. I’d be shocked, if I thought you were telling the truth,” I said, staring at Jules.

Jules laughed, but his smile wasn’t happy. “Yes. Luckily, nothing like that really happens.”

I turned away from Jules and shrugged.

“Isn’t that nice?” Jules said.

One morning, out of the blue, Baker told me that Grumbles the commissary clerk was leaving in a week and Miss Reed wanted me to come work for her. “I’d really like you to stay, Bob. You know how to do everything around here. But Miss Reed has a lot of clout with administration. I think she can get you even if I don’t agree.” Baker leaned back in his big executive chair and rested his chin on his fists. “I’ve talked to her about it, and the deal is that it’s up to you. You say you want to go, and I’ll agree. You want to go?”

Baker was pulling my strings. It wasn’t that he was dependent on me, personally; he just dreaded the hassle of finding somebody to take my place. “Well, Mr. Baker. I like working here—”

“Good—”

“—but I wouldn’t mind a change, you know?”

Baker looked very sad. “Who’s going to take your place?” he said.

I thought for a minute. “Well, we got that new guy, Winkler, the college professor?” Winkler, a tenured professor, was sent to Eglin, he said, over a three-hundred-dollar discrepancy in his tax return. He claimed he made a mistake, deducted the same business trip twice, but the government chose to prosecute. He got a year, would serve eight months. Because he wasn’t able to honor his teaching contract, he lost his job and his tenure. He was collecting stories about how people get into places like Eglin.

“Winkler? The shrink?”

“He’s a psychologist. Anyway, he can type great—good as me. He’s just being wasted now.”

“What’s he do here, anyway?” Baker asked.

“Nothing, really. I set him up with his own desk, you know, that little table in the supply room? He’s working on a book or something.”

“How long would it take? To train him?”

“A week, maybe. He’s real smart; he’s got a Ph.D., you know. Besides, Mr. Baker. I’d be just across the street. I’d be around to help him out if he had questions.”

“You’d do that?”

“Sure. I don’t mind.”

Baker nodded to himself for a while. “Well, if you think Winkler can do it, and you’re around—”

“Right across the street.”

“Okay. I’ll tell Miss Reed you’ll be there next week. You can start training Winkler right away.” Baker shook his head and sat forward on his chair. He smiled. “I’m going to miss you, Bob. You’re the best clerk I’ve ever had.”

I said thanks.

Baker grinned and said, “Bob. What does it all mean? Really?”

“I don’t know Mr. Baker. I just don’t know.”

The following week, instead of showing up at the clothing room, I knocked on the door to the commissary. I heard a key working the lock. The commissary was the only place in the camp that kept the doors locked. The door opened and Miss Reed was smiling at me. “Come in,” she said. I walked inside and watched her lock the door. We were alone in her office. “Where’s Leone and Frank?” I asked.

“They don’t show up until after lunch,” she said. “They have to work the line at night, you know.”

“Right,” I said.

“Grumbles left you quite a mess,” she said, pointing at the desk. “I wish you’d go through his stuff and figure out what you need.”

Grumbles’s desk was piled with stacks of file folders, order forms, notebooks. I couldn’t get a clue what he did by looking at his records. But I knew most of the job already because I’d been typing up receiving reports for a year. As it turned out, that’s about all the commissary clerk did, and since I was doing it for Grumbles, he’d spent most of his time working in the stockroom with Leone and Frank. The only thing he’d been doing that I didn’t know about was typing up the orders for the stuff the commissary bought. I went through a loose-leaf notebook of the orders to see how it was done. There was a chart on the wall listing the suppliers, their phone numbers, and the days of the week that they brought their stuff. Ice cream came on Wednesday. Fresh fruit came on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The local tennis shop came every Friday to deliver tennis shoes and rackets and to pick up rackets the inmates brought in for restringing. The other stuff, like radios and combs and playing cards, came from about twenty different suppliers, some local and some out of state. The job, essentially, was to keep track of the inventory and to submit the appropriate orders, timed so that the commissary’s storeroom didn’t get too crowded and we never ran out of anything. Piece of cake.

I had a lot to do to get the commissary up to snuff. I was appalled at the haphazard way Grumbles had done the inventories, so I designed and printed an inventory form that had all our products arranged in the same order that they were stored on the shelves in the storeroom. I also changed which products we carried. I canceled Sealtest and had Haagen-Dazs delivered instead—a popular move in camp. When somebody told me about a new instant Japanese soup called Oodles of Noodles I asked for a case to try out. They sold out in a day. I stocked it, bringing it in by the pallet. We sold a lot of stuff. The commissary, I soon learned, did fifty thousand dollars of business each month.

I was becoming popular in camp because of the changes I was making. The compliments felt good, and I spent a lot of my time researching our catalogs finding better products to offer. I looked forward to going to work every day. The commissary was my life.

CHAPTER 32

I heard my name called on the speaker in my dorm. Patience wasn’t due to visit until next week. I guessed it was Towler: he once said he’d try to visit. I walked through the visiting room door and saw Jerry there, beaming. I was instantly aware that I had stepped into The World. What I was doing in the commissary seemed suddenly inconsequential and pathetic. Jerry was dressed in a spiffy flight jacket. He was a corporate jet pilot. I was a convict. It was hard to believe we once flew a Huey together in some of the most vicious combat flying ever done in helicopters.

“Like your clothes,” Jerry said.

“Oh. Thanks. Blue is my favorite color. I’d pick this even if I had a choice.”

Jerry nodded, smiling, and we walked outside and sat at a picnic table.

We talked. He wanted to know how they were treating me. I said they were just people doing their jobs. I had nothing to complain about.

“How’s the appeal doing?” Jerry said. He meant the barrage of letters sent to Judge Blatt petitioning him to either release me to do an alternative sentence or to reduce my sentence.

“Well, Blatt was impressed, I guess. He reduced my sentence from five years to forty months; cut off a third.”

“Does that mean you’ll get out sooner?”

“Nope. The parole board set my sentence at two years.”

“They don’t care if your judge reduced it?”

“No. They have their guidelines. Based on the amount of pot we had, their guidelines say two years.”

He shook his head. “Damn.”

“Hey,” I said. “I don’t mind. The fact that so many people tried to help is enough for me. Most of these guys have no friends anymore. A lot of them have lost their wives. I’m lucky.”

“It’s really a crock,” Jerry said. “I read about a guy in California who murdered two people, getting five years. I think they should’ve factored in what you did for your country, you know?”

I nodded. I disagreed, but I didn’t say so. I didn’t do anything for my country. I flew for the troops. We were all victims of that bullshit war started by idiots; the least I could do was help the victims. Between us, Jerry and I saved hundreds of lives. “They did, Jerry. They put me here instead of a real prison.”

Jerry nodded. “I guess that’s something.”

“It’s a lot. I think being in a penitentiary would’ve broken me. This is bad enough.”

“Hey,” Jerry said, “I almost forgot. Congratulations on being a bestselling author. Imagine, my friend the big deal!”

“Thanks, but I’m no big deal.”

“You’re telling me? I know that, but it’s got to make you feel proud, right? I fly all over the country, and I check all the bookstores. Chickenhawk is everywhere. When my friends found out I’m the Resler in the book, they had me sign their copies.”

“What you sign as? Resler or Towler?”

“Resler.”

I smiled. “I wish I’d known where you were; I could’ve used your real name.”

“Yeah, and I could’ve corrected all the mistakes you made about me!”

I laughed. “Like what?”

“That story you told about me spending the night in a whorehouse made me real popular with Martie,” Jerry said, grinning. He and Martie were married after the war. “You got it wrong.”

“Wrong? I remember you telling us all about it. You and twenty nubiles trapped all night—”

“Yeah, I told that story because the truth was too embarrassing.”

“You’re serious? You weren’t in the whorehouse?”

“Naw. You know how I used to get drunk on one beer? Well, I had about six that night in Pleiku. When I saw I was five minutes from curfew, I panicked and tried to find my way out of town. I was so messed up, I ended up in some dark neighborhood on the outskirts of town. I knocked on a door and asked the mamasan if I could stay there. I can’t believe I did that. I probably slept in a Viet Cong’s house. Anyway, I spent the night there, and when I got back to our camp, I made up that whorehouse story so nobody’d know how stupid I was.”

I laughed a long while. “That’s a much better story. Teach you to lie.”

“Well, who would’ve thought that the guy you’re telling a story to twenty years ago is going to put it in a book?”

We talked all day, going over the past, projecting our futures. Jerry is one of the few guys with whom I can freely share my fears and dreams. Jerry understands about waking up in sweaty panics. He understands that it is normal to check for snipers, even in a park. He understands what it feels like to face death in combat. He seemed totally unimpressed that I was a convict. We tried to figure out where the guys in our old company were. Maybe we’d have a reunion one day. For a while I forgot where I was.

At three the hacks announced visiting was over. I walked Jerry to the door. While wives and children filed past us out to the real world, Jerry said, “You’ll be out of here before you know it. I want you to come visit us. Stay as long as you like. Martie says to leave your spiders at home, though.”

He smiled that goofy smile of his. He kind of looks like Stan Laurel when he tries to look happy. I nodded and we hugged. As I walked to the back of the visiting room, I suppressed tears. This prison life was turning me into a whimpering fool. I missed Patience and Jack. I missed Jerry. I even missed my damn spiders.

I stood in the line of inmates waiting to leave. We had to be checked off the roster and then pat-searched in the hallway before we left. I looked back at the door to the world, and Jerry was gone. When I got into the small hallway with two other inmates, a hack said I was going to be strip-searched. They strip-searched inmates at random, and this was my turn. I went into a closet-sized room with a hack and took off all my clothes.

The hack said “You have a nice visit?” while he checked the seams of my pants for whatever you can hide in the seams of pants.

“Yeah. My buddy from Vietnam.”

The hack nodded while he pulled out my pockets to check for the forbidden holes. “You have a Vietnamese friend?”

“No. He and I flew a helicopter together in the Army.” The hack was now checking my running shoes, to see if I’d stashed anything under the insoles.

“That’s great that you and your buddy are still in contact,” the hack said.

“Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t see each other for sixteen years.”

“Wow, sixteen years,” the hack said, after checking my clothes. “Okay. Hold up your penis, please.”

I reached down and held up my penis. This is standard procedure. A crook can supposedly hide stuff there. He nodded, “Fine. Now turn around and bend over.”

I nodded and did.

“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.

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.”

“I figured you would. I already talked to your wife. She’ll be here tomorrow morning. You’ll be cleared to go as soon as she arrives.”

Patience picked me up the next morning at eight. She said that the doctors said it was bad, but if my father made it through the next three days, he might live. She also said that she’d stayed in a motel last night and she still had the room. Why should we waste it? “In your condition, I’ll bet you’d finish in a couple of seconds. Wanna?”

After a ten-minute delay at the motel, we were on the road for the six-hour drive to Gainesville.

My dad lay in bed, pale. He couldn’t talk, but he knew we were there. Patience told him we’d stopped for a minute to get laid and he smiled. I sat beside the bed and held his hand. He didn’t seem to notice. His whole right side was paralyzed. I told him they were going to let me stay around for five days and he smiled again.

There wasn’t much to do except wait. My emotions were in an uproar. I felt good that I was walking around like a real person again, but I felt terrible seeing my dad like that.

I went out in the hall and listened to my mother and my aunt talking over and over about the attack. “He was feeding his chickens,” my mother said. “I wondered where he was; he was later than usual. Then I looked outside and saw him lying on the ground.”

Later my mother asked, “Are you going to spend the night here?”

“I’ll stay around until I get tired,” I said. “I don’t see what staying here will do for him.”

“He’ll know you’re here, Bob,” my mother said.

“He’s asleep most of the time, Mom. He needs the rest.”

“You never do what I want you to do,” my mother said.

“Mom,” I said, “I’ve been in jail for sixteen months. I won’t get another furlough. I’ll be here most of the time, but I want to spend some time with Patience and Jack. You know, try to patch my life back together?”

“Your dad is lying in there dying and all you can think about is yourself,” my mother said.

“Mom. You’re his wife. Where will you be?”

My mother glared at me. “Nobody cares how I feel,” she said. “You just don’t know how this has affected me. Everybody’s worried about him. What about me? Now I have chest pains. I have to go home and take care of all those damn animals he collected.”

“Don’t worry about the animals, Betty,” my aunt said. “I know what to do. I was helping Jack—”

“I need to rest,” my mother said. “Chest pains. I have to go home.”

My aunt shrugged at me. I nodded.

I called my friend, Joe Leps, now a nursing student, and asked him what he would charge to stay with my father for a few nights. He said he’d do it for a nursing book he needed. “That’s all?” I said.

“Yep. Just the book. I’ll watch him for you.”

With Joe on watch at nights, I slept with Patience in our own bed in the upstairs of our cabin. During the days, I attended to a few details to get ready for my eventual homecoming. I went to the driver’s license bureau at the highway patrol station to renew my license. They had a computer at the highway patrol station, and it knew I’d gotten a speeding ticket in South Carolina seven years earlier doing eighty-eight miles an hour, but it didn’t know I was in jail. When the clerk asked me if my address was the same, I said yes, expecting her to say something like, “What? Says here you’re a convict!” But she didn’t.

At the end of three days, my dad was improving. He still couldn’t talk or move his right side, but the doctors said he’d probably make it and started him on a regimen of physical and speech therapy. I felt relieved.

When my five days were up, Patience drove me back to Eglin.

I seldom saw John Tillerman. He worked in camp at the administration building, ate at different times, and lived in a different dorm. He stopped by my cube occasionally and visited. His obsession with getting in shape had worked. He now weighed 165 pounds, and it was 165 pounds of muscle. He could bench press 280 pounds at the weight shack. When we talked, it was usually while we walked laps on the jogging trail. John usually talked about Dave, going over and over the foul-up that got us busted. John complained that Dave and the gang had done nothing to help us. There was an understanding, John said, that Dave would help our wives while we were locked up. Patience didn’t need the help because of my extraordinary luck with my book, but Alice did. John claimed he was going to find Dave when he got out and make his life miserable. It was all he talked about, and I think that having that focus was actually good for him. Life in camp was mentally stultifying. Revenge gave him a healthy goal.

In May, when I had about a week left before my release to a halfway house in Ocala, I was reading in my cube when two Cubans started a loud argument in the hall right next to me. In the intervening eight months since the big Cuban roundup, their population had returned to its previous level. It was noisy again. I’d had one blessing in the meantime: the prison had removed all the phones from the dorms and installed a calling center in a small shed attached to the administration building. It was not as convenient, but it was quieter.

I tried to ignore the chatter. Then I heard some guys in the section yell “Shutthefuckup!” but the Cubans ignored them. I was looking at my book, but I wasn’t reading. Anger welled within me. I had endured, for almost two years, what I considered bedlam, and now these two guys were pushing me over the edge. I concentrated on the book. They yammered away, louder. Finally I threw down my book, stomped out of my cube, and approached the two Cubans.

I recognized one of them. He’d been here as long as me. “Hey. How about a break? There’s got to be a couple of miles of hallways in this camp. Why here? Better yet, why not outside?”

They stared at me like I’d accused them of being too friendly with their mothers, faced each other, and started talking again. I don’t know what they were talking about. They spoke Spanish.

“Hey,” I said. “Didn’t you understand me?”

The guy I recognized said, “We understand you. We can talk anywhere we want. This is a public hallway.”

Something snapped inside me—the insanity fuse, I suppose. I walked up to them and pushed my face into theirs like I’d learned to do in the Army. “You want to talk?” I yelled. “Then let’s fucking talk!”

They backed up a little. I’d surprised them. I’d surprised myself. “Hey. What’s wrong with you, man? You crazy?”

“Crazy? Me? No, you assholes, I want to talk, too. I can talk any fucking place I want to. Why not here? This is a public hallway!”

“You’re asking for big trouble, man,” said one of the Cubans.

“Trouble?” My voice was getting louder as I spoke. “For talking in a fucking public hallway?” I yelled. “C’mon, let’s talk. I like to talk.”

“I’m gonna take you to Tallahassee with me if you don’t leave us alone!” yelled one.

“Fine!” I yelled. “I’d love to go to Tallahassee! Talk, goddamn it! Let’s talk!”

If I had a fight, we’d all go to a real prison, maybe Tallahassee, and I’d stay there for my full term, possibly longer. I knew that, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to me. What I wanted was to be left alone. I wanted some peace in the bedlam, and these guys were in the way.

The guy I knew stepped away from my intruding face and yelled, “Okay, motherfucker. You asked for it. You and me. You and me are going on a trip, motherfucker!”

“Fine,” I yelled, closing on him. “Let’s go!” This was all the more absurd when you consider that I’d never had a fight with anyone since the third grade, unless you consider pummeling your buddies in basic training fighting. “C’mon,” I yelled.

I thought my ferocity was finally getting through to them because I saw their eyes widen as I snarled like a lunatic. They moved farther away, edging toward the door. Hey, I was tougher than I thought. “Whatsa matter, assholes? Don’t want to talk anymore?” I yelled.

The Cuban stuttered with rage, glaring at me, and also glancing over my shoulder. “Lucky for you, motherfucker,” the Cuban said. “I’m going on furlough tomorrow. But when I come back—you and me. You and me, motherfucker. We’re going to Tallahassee,” he screamed. And then, miraculously, they turned and left, pausing only once to shake their fists. I heard cheering in the section. I turned around and saw twenty smiling heads bobbing over the cube walls. I turned farther around and saw that Sammy McGuire was standing behind me. Sammy McGuire the famous Cuban killer from Dorm Three. He’d come up to help me. It was him they’d been staring at. It was Sammy they were afraid of. “Hey, Sammy,” I said, “thanks a lot. I didn’t know you were there.”

“That’s okay, Bob. Those boys just don’t have the simplest fucking manners, you know? I don’t know how they get that way.” He smiled and said “You did all right, Bob” and walked back to his cube.

CHAPTER 33

Early Friday morning, May 17, 1985. I’d been awake since two a.m. In the dim light of the exit sign, I double-checked my cube. Everything was gone except a few books. My sheets and blankets were all packed into one pillowcase, my prison clothes and work boots were stuffed in another. I wore the last set of blues I’d wear in prison. I’d change into my street clothes on the way out.

I’d just shipped all my personal stuff home, including my untouched robot manuscript. When I took the boxes to the administration building for inspection prior to shipment, the hack there said good-bye and asked what I was going to do when I got out. “I’m going to get a faster boat,” I said, and laughed with him.

I took the books and put them on Walton’s desk. He’d be here for a few more months. I sat down on my bunk. Four-thirty: that’s what time they were coming for me. My watch said four. I walked over to the water fountain and drank. I went to the glass doors and leaned against the frame. The mess hall was lit up, the inmate kitchen crew was making breakfast. I went back to my cube and lay down on my stripped mattress.

I waited.

Maybe they forgot. I stood up and checked the section. No hack in sight. I lay down. Maybe they did forget. They forgot lots of things.

I waited. I remembered my ice-cream party. I had it the previous Sunday. It was a sign of my status in the prisoner hierarchy that I could have an ice-cream party on a Sunday. The commissary was closed during the weekends, so you had to have a party during the week or you couldn’t get the ice cream. I used my connections in the kitchen and stored about forty pints of Haagen-Dazs in the kitchen freezer. Further proof of my power was that the ice cream was still there when I went to pick it up. It was a good party, I thought.

I got the ice cream on Friday. Elliott Ness was working the register when I went behind the line and started loading up a shopping bag with pints of Haagen-Dazs from the ice-cream freezer. He said, “Getting ready to leave, Bob?”

“Yeah, Mr. Holbrook. I’m going to zero my account.”

He nodded and pulled my account sheet. “You have twenty-four dollars left, enough for ten pints and some change.”

“Keep the change.”

“Can’t. We’ll send you a check.”

I nodded and continued packing the ice cream into the bag. Leone, who was working the line with Frank, came over and asked if I needed any help. I said no, put the twentieth pint in the bag, set it aside, and popped open another bag. “How much you taking, Bob?” Leone asked.

“I have enough money for ten,” I said. Leone blinked and stared at the bag I had just filled. He glanced over his shoulder at Elliott Ness and grinned. I filled up the second bag and picked them both up, freezing against my body. I walked toward Elliott Ness, toward the door. “You got your ten?” he asked.

“Yessir,” I said. At least ten. I didn’t know why I was doing this. I was risking a lot, stealing in a prison camp in full view of a guard—after never having stolen anything for nearly two years—a few days before my release. It just happened. Maybe I’m incorrigible. Elliott Ness, who knew me as the squarest and most trustworthy of the commissary crew, didn’t even look up. He put my account sheet in the machine and charged my account. I walked outside, grinning. As my last official act in Eglin, I had committed larceny in front of the FBI.

That afternoon at the mess hall, Leone came over and sat at my table. Leone never sat with me; I wasn’t in his clique of friends, they being mostly Mafia and other serious crooks. My being a writer and small-time pot smuggler was okay, but it certainly wasn’t something you’d want to brag about. My impression was that Leone thought I was the straightest wimp he’d run into. He once accused me of running the commissary like I owned stock in it. Leone sat down, grinning. He leaned over his tray and said, “Bob. That was really something. Now, now I respect you.”

It had been a long twenty months. It was actually ending? Knox had written me earlier, comparing my incarceration with his collection of tropical fish. He said, “I got some guppies just for movement, and now they’ve given birth, so the population rises—and none of these guys get out on weekend passes. Ever. The only way they leave is fins first.” I was leaving, and I was still alive.

I was grinning to myself when Tarzan walked by with his flashlight. I stood up and watched him checking each cube on my aisle. He walked back to me. “Ready?” Tarzan said.

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

He shined his light around inside my cube. “All cleaned up?”

“All cleaned up.”

“Okay, grab your sheets and stuff.”

I picked up the two pillowcases and followed Tarzan out the door.

Dawn was a faint glow in the east. I followed Tarzan over to the clothing room and dumped the pillowcases into the piles of clothes in the bins. Then we walked together up the long sidewalk to the administration building. Tree frogs croaked, crickets chirped. Our footsteps crackled sand on the sidewalk. Tomorrow, and for all tomorrows, an inmate would be sweeping it clean. I looked around as I walked, trying to memorize the scene: the shadow of a huge oak barely perceptible against the early glow of dawn; dim lights in dorms filled with seven hundred and fifty sleeping men; Tarzan strolling ahead of me, still unapproachable after almost two years; men moving as shadows against dim lights inside the guard shack. I didn’t want to forget any of this.

Tarzan didn’t talk. Of all the hacks I’d known, Tarzan had the least to do with the inmates. “I’m sure going to miss this place,” I said.

“Sure,” Tarzan said.

CHAPTER 34

After an eight-hour ride from prison, I met Patience at the bus station in Ocala. You can ride home in your car on furloughs, fly if you want, but you have to take the bus when you leave. Technically, you’re still in custody when you’re transferred from the prison to the halfway house. It’s a rule.

We drove to the address and found a white brick house with a sign out front that said SALVATION ARMY. When I saw this, I began to have regrets that I’d fought so hard to get a four-month halfway house. The counselors said I already had a job. The idea of the halfway house was to help a convict get a job and get back into society. I had argued that I couldn’t live forever on one book, I really had to get back to work, try to write another book. They gave me the halfway house. Now, looking at the Salvation Army building, I began to have doubts.

A woman inside showed me the bunk room where I’d be staying five nights a week for the next four months. The room was down the hall from where the normal clients of the Salvation Army, the homeless and destitute, stayed. There was room for ten men in the bunk room which the Salvation Army provided on contract with the state and federal prison systems. The bunks were equipped with lumpy, plastic mattresses.

The woman said I’d have to go check in with the head of the place. Captain Eugene Gerber, at his office in another part of town. Patience and I drove to Gerber’s office.

Gerber knew all about me. He sat behind his desk under a picture of Jesus Christ and lectured me and Patience for two hours about the kind of “ship” he ran. He was a Navy veteran, a sailor. Now he was captain of the local Salvation Army. Gerber ran a tight ship.

Gerber read from a whole list of regulations: I’d have to be at the Salvation Army every night by ten except Friday and Saturday night. On weekends, the felons got passes if we hadn’t fucked up by breaking any of the rules. I was to keep my bunk straight; I’d also be responsible for keeping the bathroom clean; I was subject to random urine checks, which, if I failed, would send me back to prison. I could, however, drink if I didn’t get drunk. Gerber had more regulations than Eglin, and read them all. Finally he said I had to get a job.

I said, “Captain Gerber, I have a job. I’m a writer.”

“I’ve heard. Do you get a paycheck every week?”

“No. Writers usually get paid twice a year. Royalty payments.”

“I have to see a paycheck every week,” Captain Gerber said.

I was about to say I’d made a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in less than two years, but I knew that would only piss him off. So I said, “I’ll get a paycheck every week.”

“Fine. Where will you work?”

I’d heard I might run into this problem, so I’d already called Knox about it. “I’ll be working for my agent, at home.”

Gerber nodded. “That’s okay with me. Have him send me a letter saying you’re employed by him. I want to see a Xerox copy of each paycheck, each week. Also, keep in mind that you have to check in here before six every day.”

“I thought you said I’d have to be here at ten.”

“That’s right. But we have to see you punch in at the time clock after work. You’re free from then until ten.”

“I live in High Springs, Captain Gerber. That’s sixty miles from here. Couldn’t I just call you and tell you I’m finished working for the day?”

“No. I have to see that card punched every day. Before six.”

This guy was going to show me what power was all about. I already knew one guy in Gerber’s halfway house, a former inmate from my section at Eglin, who worked in Gainesville, thirty miles away, and he didn’t have to check in after work. There was no way around this guy—it was a rule. He was simply being selective about enforcing it. I could feel my face getting red. I said, “Fine. Is that all?”

Gerber smiled. “Yes. You follow the rules to the letter, Mr. Mason, and we’ll get along just fine.”

On the way to a restaurant in Ocala, I went into a rage and told Patience I wanted to go back to prison, where people were reasonable. Patience said I didn’t love her, and I shut up.

I fell into a new daily routine: I got up at five-thirty in the felon’s bunkhouse, made a cup of coffee in the kitchen, got into our Escort, and drove sixty miles to High Springs. I stopped off at my parents’ at six-thirty and had coffee. My dad was improving. He couldn’t walk or use his right arm, but he was talking well enough to understand. My mother wanted to sell the farm and move to Gainesville, closer to the doctors.

By seven-thirty, I was home. I’d make Patience a cup of coffee, drink another cup myself, read the paper, and be at work by nine. I worked on my robot book in the attic of our cabin. Patience had bought a computer while I was in prison, so now I had a new way to write. I trashed the manuscript I’d carried with me for two years because, as Knox said, it wasn’t “up to the standards you set in Chickenhawk, Bob.” As a matter of fact, Knox not only hated what I’d written, he hated the idea. Knox doesn’t like science fiction, and he especially hates robot stories. That was okay. My goal was to write a robot story that Knox would like because I didn’t want the book to be considered strictly science fiction. I wanted the average reader to experience my robot as though it were real, now. Knox would be my litmus test.

I wrote from nine to twelve every day and then spent time working on the cabin. I’d left it unfinished and Patience was reluctant to have anything done until I got back.

At four-thirty in the afternoon, I left for Ocala, where, at five-thirty or so, I put my time card into the time clock and put the card back in the rack. Now I was free until ten, but I was in Ocala.

Ocala is a small place but it had a nice library. I spent most of my time in the library. If there was a movie playing I hadn’t seen, I went to see it. I saw every movie released from May to September 1985. I also tried to shop for new clothes. All my stuff was old before I went to prison. It was even worse now.

Shopping was really difficult. The big department stores were incredibly intimidating. I saw how much stuff people really needed when I ran the commissary. Nobody needs all this stuff, I thought. The stores were overstocked. They had way too many brands of duplicate products. It was a tragic waste.

I spent hours looking at shirts, checking prices, trying them on. The result of most of my shopping trips was that I agonized for hours and ended up buying nothing. I couldn’t decide; I’d freeze trying to decide to buy a shirt for twenty-five dollars or one for twenty. I worried myself sick that I’d run out of money. I’d been living on thirty-three dollars a month. Just one decent shirt cost more than that. I had lots of money in the bank, but I had no confidence I’d ever sell another book, and how long would I get royalties from Chickenhawk? It took me four months to buy four shirts and four pairs of pants. I spent two weeks stalking a mall before I got the courage to buy a pair of running shoes.

By ten I was checked in at the Salvation Army. The television in the front room was permanently tuned to the Christian Broadcasting Company. Jim and Tammy Bakker were the drill on Captain Gerber’s ship. Each night the people in the front room were different. The rule was that indigents could stay one night. They got dinner after a prayer meeting. They got breakfast before they had to leave the next day, no prayers required. These people, men mostly, sat staring at Jim and Tammy telling them how God would help them just like He’d helped Jim and Tammy. Homeless men stared at the effervescent, clown-faced Tammy Bakker with vacant eyes.

One morning, while I made my coffee, I watched a young mother with a baby and a two-year-old eating breakfast. I asked her where she was going. She said she’d go as far as she could walk. One of the benefits of capitalism is that it offers constant reminders of the consequences of failure, especially if you hang around places like the Salvation Army. I felt terrible. I wanted to do something for her, but deciding what to do about her and the others that drifted into this place every day was even tougher than picking out a shirt. I wasn’t able to help. I nodded, poured my coffee, and left. That, I figured, was where I was going to be if I didn’t get another book published.

The routine changed on Friday. Patience came with me to Ocala in the afternoon. I turned in my Xeroxed paycheck from Knox, punched in, and punched out for the weekend. Then we drove to Gainesville and went to the Wine and Cheese Gallery. There, in a small courtyard behind the restaurant, I saw old friends and met new people—none of them felons—musicians, attorneys, professors, computer programmers, and so on. The Friday meetings became a regular thing and I began drinking beer. The Wine and Cheese had a hundred different brands from all over the world, and I probably tried them all over a period of four months. I hadn’t had a drink or a joint or even a cigarette for nearly two years. I’d been detoxed. I wanted to get retoxed.

Saturdays I worked on the cabin. On Sundays I lay around and read until about eight-thirty. Then I’d attempt to choose some clothes to wear at the bunkhouse. I found the task frustrating and irksome. Why do I have to pick what I wear every day? Why doesn’t everybody just wear the same thing?

One Sunday night, after spending an hour agonizing over just what I should wear at the Salvation Army, I said, “Patience. What High Springs needs is a clothing room.”

“What?”

“You know. A place that does all your laundry and gives everybody uniforms. You wouldn’t have to worry if you were in style. The clothes would be cheaper. People would be a lot happier if they had a clothing room.”

Patience looked at me sadly and shook her head.

During July, John Tillerman showed up for his four-month halfway house. He, too, had to get a job, and he chose to be a free-lance carpenter. I hired him to help me finish the cabin. He put in wallboard upstairs, a cypress ceiling downstairs. I installed two air conditioners so our papers and books wouldn’t mildew.

On August 12, 1985, I was released from the halfway house to the custody of the parole office in Gainesville. I met my parole officer, Jack Gamble, at his office in the courthouse. He had been my pre-sentencing investigator, and was a fair man. He told me I couldn’t use drugs. I asked if that included alcohol and tobacco. He said those were fine. I said they kill a thousand times more people than all illegal drugs combined. Gamble nodded and said, “That may be true, but they’re legal.” He continued, saying I had to expect unannounced visits from him; I’d be free to travel anywhere I wanted, with permission. Everywhere except Central and South America. They were afraid I’d smuggle in another load, I guess. All I had to do on parole was submit a monthly statement saying I still lived at the same place and how much I earned that month. Again, the fact that I was paid only twice a year brought complaints from Mr. Gamble’s bosses. “Bob, it looks bad when you say you earned nothing for months at a time,” he said after I’d turned in three reports indicating zero income. When I got my royalty statement from Knox, I made a copy and sent it to Mr. Gamble. I’d made over a hundred thousand and I included a note saying; “In case anybody asks you why I don’t report a monthly income, show them this.” I wanted them to know that I was equally capable of being snotty.

I wrote about 150 pages of the second version of my robot book. I’d changed the whole story. I invented an undercover Russian agent to come to Florida (where the robot was built) to nab the machine. I thought it was pretty good; so did Patience. Knox sent a note back saying, “I just don’t get this, Bob.”

I was invited to give a reading in Chicago in June. Larry Heinemann had arranged it and invited us to stay with them. I was going to meet Larry for the first time and worried that we might not get along. I mean, he’d been wonderful and generous to me, writing to me in jail, sending me books, but what if he turned out to be an asshole in person?

Gamble gave me travel papers and we flew to Chicago, took a cab to Larry’s house. He came out wearing a baseball cap and said, “Welcome to Chicago, Bob. I’m glad you’re out of jail. We got rules here, too. Never pick a fight in a strange bar. Never cheer for the Yankees. And never, ever park your car in the same place twice.” We got along great. His wife, Edie, and Patience clicked, too.

Chicago was having a better-late-than-never welcome-home parade for Vietnam veterans. Neither Larry nor I wanted to go. The Chicago Sun-Times sent Tom Fitzpatrick over to get our feelings about the parade. When Fitzpatrick asked us if we were going, Larry said, “Nope. It’s just another fucking formation to me.”

I said, “Nope. Pilots don’t march.”

Patience was disgusted with us and made us go. “You don’t have to march,” she said. “Just watch. But go.”

We did, and I’m glad. It was heartwarming to see the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out to applaud and whistle and generally behave as though Vietnam vets weren’t losers after all. General Westmoreland gave a speech which Larry and I boycotted. Westmoreland, to me, was a fool whose strategy of attrition—killing people without taking territory—was responsible for that war lasting ten years and costing fifty-eight thousand American lives plus millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and even Thais. Now he was an old man and I just wanted to leave him alone. Heinemann said I was too kind, and held Westmoreland in such contempt that he probably would’ve choked him if they’d met.

Larry had just published his second book, Paco’s Story, which later won the National Book Award. He knew what he was doing. I talked to him about the trouble I was having with my robot book. He said that my strongest skill seemed to be in first-person narrative, like Chickenhawk. Maybe I should think about that.

I spent a month writing a hundred pages of a new robot book, version three. This time, the robot told the story. Clever, eh? First-person narrative. I sent this to Knox and then we drove to Maine to spend a month at my mother-in-law’s cabin on the lake. While I was there, Knox sent me back the manuscript saying, “I just don’t get this, Bob.”

I called him up and we talked. “You aren’t getting the reader involved, Bob. I kept falling asleep with this thing. You have to make people care about a machine, and I don’t think you can do it.” He paused. “Well, what are you going to do next? Get a job?”

“I don’t know. I guess I won’t write any more robot stories.”

“Good,” Knox said.

We stayed another two weeks in Maine. I concentrated on refining my sailing skills with a little Sunfish. In the evenings I sat on the porch and watched the lake, listening to waves rustling the sand, hearing loons wail. I was feeling like a freak, a one-book flash in the pan. I wasn’t really a writer, I’d just been lucky. I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to do, and my money would run out in a year or so.

One evening a few days before we left, while I daydreamed by the lake, I saw my robot, a black plastic mannequin-looking machine, stalking silently through a jungle. Wet leaves plastered its eye covers, spider webs and jungle debris covered its body, but the robot (I had no name for it) ignored the stuff clinging to him and moved stealthily and purposely among the shadows of the jungle, stalking. The image was very exciting. My high-tech robot was contrasted against the organic lushness of the jungle, emphasizing its alien nature. I’d been telling my robot story set in laboratories where the robot just blended in with the rest of the high-tech gadgetry. The image stayed with me.

When we got back to High Springs, I decided to work on the cabin. I didn’t write a word. I spent a month installing a brick patio around the cabin. I built an upstairs deck which opened out of the eight-foot-square office Patience and I shared and made it seem larger. John and I put on a catwalk out front, a ledge to stand on to wash the bedroom windows, and built a small shed to house the washer and dryer.

The image kept returning, always the same: the robot was stalking something in a jungle and disappeared into the darkness. What was it tracking? Where was it? Who made it? Why?

When I finished my cabin improvements, a plot jumped into my head. The robot was in a rain forest in Costa Rica. The robot was being tested by the Army. (I had read about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency sponsoring research for such a weapon.) It was stalking a man as part of the test. That’s all I knew. I started writing.

In every version of the robot story prior to this one, I’d spent a lot of time developing a detailed outline, following it carefully, because that’s how I thought you were supposed to do it. I had only a vague idea what the plot might be for this book, and I wanted to try an experiment: I was just going to start writing and see what happened.

I worked for four months on the first 150 pages. During that time, Knox called and wanted to know what I was doing. He said, “Please don’t tell me you’re working on another robot book.”

“I’m working on another robot book.”

“Jesus, Bob. You don’t give up, do you?”

“Nope.”

“Well, send it up when you have something to show me,” Knox said, his voice reeking with pity.

I had no name for the robot until the first human character, the soldier it’d been stalking in a test, talked to it when it flunked the test by becoming more interested in a dragonfly than in killing the soldier. The soldier approached the robot and said, “Nice bug you got there, Solo.” Ah. Solo was the robot’s name. I had wondered what it might be.

I rewrote the manuscript (I was using a Macintosh, and the rewrites were fast) two times until I thought it could take Knox’s criticism. I knew it worked this time. I sent it to Knox.

A week later Knox called. His voice was filled with enthusiasm. “I don’t believe it, Bob. I actually gave a shit what happens to this thing, and I hate robots. You’ve actually done it.”

I decided to finish the book rather than try to sell it based on the first part, as I had done with Chickenhawk. Much of the story took place in a small Nicaraguan village where the robot hid from its makers. I’d never been to Nicaragua, and I wanted to know at least what it looked like. I wanted to talk to Nicaraguans to see how they talked, lived, what they ate, how they cooked, what color the sand was at Lake Nicaragua, where the story was set; I wanted to see the two mile-high volcanoes, Las Maderas and Concepcion in the lake, and a hundred other things.

I called Mr. Gamble and asked him what my chances were of getting permission to go there—a business trip, I said. He said I could try, but he knew the parole board would refuse. I didn’t want to spar with bureaucrats who make life tedious, so I spent a few months doing extensive research in the Latin American Library at the University of Florida. I read nineteenth-century explorers’ journals (in which I discovered a whole section on Nicaraguan superstitions), I read travel books, I read several histories of Nicaragua. (In my research, I discovered that the reason Nicaragua had always had so much trouble with the United States was that they happened to own the very best spot in all of Central America to build a sea-level canal. Their history is filled with broken treaties over the building of this canal on what the U.S. government still considers to be a strategic site. Nicaraguans didn’t like the idea of an American-owned canal crossing their country, and were not easily pushed around. We even sent in Marines to enforce our will. In five years of fighting, the Marines were defeated by Agusto Sandino.) I had plenty of book information, but I wanted eyewitness details. I put an ad in the paper requesting interviews with Nicaraguans. I talked to several families who told me things I couldn’t find in books. The kinds of beds peasants sleep on. Favorite country meals. I learned that Nicaraguans loved a coffee and cocoa drink, piniolio, that was so common in that country that other Central Americans called Nicaraguans Piniolios. Armed with these details, I invented a peasant village, a cooperative, and populated it with whole families. Eusebio, a teenage boy, became a major character. I modeled his mother, Modesta, on a woman, Sebastiana, we’d known in Spain. I invented life in the village, basing it on the seven months we’d spent in the village of Almonaster La Real. Everything was coming together. Solo would have a place to hide, people to talk to—people who’d use a two-billion-dollar machine to gather firewood and work on their trucks. I had a plot.

Two years after I got out of prison, I sent the completed book to Knox. I decided to call it Weapon. Knox sent it to Viking because Viking had the right of first refusal as part of my contract for Chickenhawk. Gerry Howard refused to buy it, which astounded me. Hey, I thought. Remember me? I’m a goddamn best-selling author, here. What the hell’s going on? Gerry said Viking wasn’t publishing science fiction, which was a nice way of saying he hated the book.

Knox sent it to other publishers and it was rejected. Most of the editors expressed surprise because Weapon had nothing to do with Vietnam. Mason is supposed to be a Vietnam writer, isn’t he?

I sent a copy of the manuscript to Bill Smith in California. A week later, he sent me back a two-page letter pointing out a few weak points, but saying, “If this is science-fiction, then I love science-fiction.” He said that I might try writing a new opening chapter that would introduce the location of the story and some of the main characters more gradually than I’d done.

I agreed with Bill’s suggestion about a new opening chapter. I called Knox and told him to withdraw the book. I was rewriting it.

A month later, I sent him the new version. Gerry Howard said he wanted to read it, and did, and rejected it a second time. This writing business is not a piece of cake.

Months went by. I was getting the same kinds of rejections: I like it, but it has nothing to do with Vietnam. With Chickenhawk, they’d said no one wanted to read about Vietnam; now everybody did. It looked like I had to write about Vietnam or nothing.

Even if I was not having much success being a writer, I acted like one. I enjoyed being around writers. Mike Costello, the writer who’d cut firewood for Patience while I was gone, and his wife, Patti, were now two of our best friends, and we saw them almost every Saturday night.

I met Padgett Powell (who wrote Edisto) at a reading I gave at the University of Florida. I met Jack C. Haldeman II, a science fiction writer, and through him, his brother Joe Haldeman, the author of a science fiction classic, The Forever War. These three guys lived in the Gainesville area and became my friends.

Padgett liked my robot story well enough to recommend that I teach his writing class at the university while he took a year’s sabbatical. The writing faculty at the university vetoed that idea, saying I was too commercial. I knew what they meant. I’d gotten a degree in fine arts, majoring in photography. During my art school days, we were taught that anyone making money selling their work, not in galleries, was highly suspect of not being a fine artist at all, but an illustrator, a common tradesman like Norman Rockwell. Writing popular books, for many members of the literati, borders on prostitution.

The accumulation of rejections, being considered too commercial by the academics, and the fact that I was running out of money were making me depressed. I left Solo to wander around New York to find a publisher while I began research for a book I wanted to write about Arabia.

A group of Vietnam veterans at the Union Correctional Institution, a very serious state prison near Raiford, Florida, invited me to give a talk to their group. Reluctantly, I agreed. I brought Patience with me. The idea of going into this prison was daunting. Raiford is not Eglin. It is surrounded by high walls, guard towers, and barbed wire. Our escort said the average sentence there was life. I enjoyed talking to the prisoners, but was very happy to leave. I found the place scary as hell.

On the drive home, Patience told me that one of the inmates had said he wished his wife had been as understanding as she—it might’ve kept him out of prison. It made her cry. She decided that she’d write a book for the wives of Vietnam vets, called, she announced in the car, Vietnam: A Woman’s Guide.

She wrote a proposal immediately. I was happy to see her doing it. She’s a great writer, and somebody in the family had to publish a book. She sent her idea to Knox, who sent it on to Gerry Howard, the editor who hates robots, and damn if he didn’t buy it. He offered Patience an advance of fifteen thousand dollars, twice what they’d given me, and she was ecstatic. So was I, but why did he give her more than me? Knox sent a note later saying, “Jeez—don’t let this Viking Penguin business go to Patience’s head! Keep her in the kitchen as much as possible…”

Joe Haldeman and his wife, Gay, were visiting us at the cabin one afternoon soon after Patience sold her book. The chatter was happy. Joe had just sold his sixteenth book, Tool of the Trade; Patience had just sold her first. I lurked in the corner forcing smiles when they looked my way. It’s tough being around successful people when you aren’t, especially if you claim to be in the same profession. They’d poured some champagne to toast their successes. I declined because, I said, champagne gave me a headache. As they drank their goddamn champagne, the phone rang.

It was Knox. “I’ve got some interest from Putnam, Bob. I’ll know in an hour. How do you want to get paid?” He meant did I want all the advance at once or did I want to break it up into payments. My heart was beating wildly in my throat. I said I’d like installments.

I had a glass of champagne, and in half an hour Knox called back and said it was a deal. Lisa Wager, a senior editor at G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a very discerning and intelligent woman, who obviously had great taste, loved Weapon.

Finally, after ten years of trying, Solo lived.

While Weapon was still an unedited manuscript, it was optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox to be a movie. Knox sold it to publishers in England, Japan, and Germany. In a few months, I’d gathered in a whole bunch of sheaves, as they say.

The book wasn’t a best-seller, but the reviews were great. The New York Times (which did not consider it science fiction, but a technothriller), said “Put it at the top of your list” and later included it in their list of notable books for 1989. What did Gerry Howard know about robots, anyway? I had broken the one-book barrier.

Patience’s book came out as Recovering from the War: A Woman’s Guide to Helping Your Vietnam Vet, Your Family, and Yourself in 1990. Viking sent her on a book tour. I went with her and got some of the writer’s perks I’d missed while I was in jail. We were on the Today Show together and stayed at posh hotels in twelve cities all over the country. Patience is now working on a new book.

Jack, now twenty-eight, is a musician. His group, NDolphin, was very popular in the Gainesville area until they broke up. He writes all of his songs, a talent which Patience and I assume he inherited from us, but he also writes and plays his own music, something that is totally mysterious to two people who can’t carry a tune in a bucket.

I’ve written Solo, a sequel to Weapon, and this book you are now reading.

In March 1989, the U.S. Parole Commission released me from their supervision, and in May the Florida Office of Executive Clemency sent me a piece of paper entitled certificate of restoration of civil rights.

Officially, I am just like everybody else. Back in the world.