Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

“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.