Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

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.