Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“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.”