Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

At this time in my life, about the most important thing to me was my motorcycle. It was an intoxicating machine, a freedom ride. I had to return the rental truck in Ocala and take the Honda back to Melbourne for one more week of work at Radiation. I lashed the bike to the metal tie-down rings inside the truck and left that afternoon. In Ocala, a kid ran out in front of me chasing a ball. I slammed on the brakes in time to miss him. I felt a terrific crash in the back of the truck. Stopped, got out, and opened the doors. My pride-and-joy bike was lying on the deck up against the forward wall. The tie-down rings had ripped out. I lashed the bike upright and returned the truck. When I got the bike off the truck, I could see only minor damage to the front fender. When I got on the road, however, the front forks shook badly as I approached sixty. The shaking got worse as I accelerated, then went away at about eighty. I drove at eighty, thinking I should have hit the kid.

A week later, after a messy good-bye with Mary in which I knew the thing wasn’t over because I didn’t really have the guts to end it, I left Melbourne.

I was back in school studying photography.

I made pictures, enthusiastically at first, but soon got bored—a familiar pattern. Back from the war (it was still being fought) four years, yet nothing seemed to interest me. I spent a lot of time drinking and staring at television. Star Trek would hypnotize me; commercials, too. Fantasies interested me. Television was mind-numbing, which is what I wanted. Patience interrupted now and then. “Bob,” she usually said, pointing to Jack standing by my chair, “Jack’s been trying to talk to you for twenty minutes.” I’d listen to Jack telling me about some skirmish he was having with a neighbor kid for a minute and then, when he left, become absorbed in the tube, no matter what was on. I stayed up until the stations went off the air and the television showed snow. I watched that, too, trying to see things in the randomness. I was trying not to ever have to sleep, to avoid leaping up in a panic.

My idea of fun was to get on my bike at midnight, speeding down country roads at a hundred and thirty. Lying on the gas tank, headlight blazing a tunnel ahead, trees swishing by in a blur, reminding me of flying. Low-level flying. Come back, the house would be still. Air humid. Life stagnant.

I had to turn in a final project for my drawing class. I dragged out my old footlocker from Vietnam, still clearly marked: wo-1 robert c. mason; w3152420. I took everything out and set it up so the end became the bottom and the lid opened on the side. I drew a picture of myself from a slide of me holding my M-1 carbine, smiling a crazed smile, tacked it on the lid of the footlocker. I stuck my bronze star to the drawing. I put a dozen jagged punji stakes on the bottom of the locker, shoved an old fatigue blouse and a plastic wig stand into the sharp stakes. I put my flight helmet on the wig stand and pulled down the black visor. I stared at this creation for hours, short of breath. I splashed red paint all over the punji stakes; spattered drops onto the drawing.

I had a box of memories that I would bury. That would be part of the whole drawing, the burial. I needed something to get the viewers’ attention, something that’d give them a sample jolt of fear. I rigged a wire from the lid to the trigger of a pistol loaded with blanks mounted so it pointed at whoever opened the box. When they open this box, I thought, they won’t forget it.

I go to class. Set the box on a table near the rest of the drawings. Wait. A girl asks what’s in the box. My drawing. She looks puzzled, shrugs. She is not going to get this. A guy asks the same, he’s frail, scared of me because I always wear sunglasses and never talk to anybody. He is going to piss in his pants. Eugene Grissom, the department chairman, comes in to help with the grading. Grissom’s a vet. He will get it. Maybe he will also throw me out of school.

I tell my instructor, John O’Connor, I have a question. We go to his office. I tell him the nifty trick with the gun. John’s mouth drops open, looks nervous. “I get the idea, Bob. But don’t you think it’s going to scare the shit out of these people?’’

“That’s the idea. Scared shitless is the drawing.”

John nods for a while. “Okay. Okay. But what if we disconnect the gun and just tell everybody it was rigged to go off? That’ll scare them, too.”

“You think just knowing it could go off will scare them?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. I believe you’ll get a very good reaction, Bob. And I won’t have to have a heart attack.”

“It’s just a blank—”

“The noise, Bob. Inside a building?”

“Oh, yeah. Inside here. Make a helluva bang, eh?” I laugh.

“So will you disconnect the gun?”

“Well, John, what about my grade? I mean, without the booby trap, lots of the idea is just … lost.”

“No. No way it’ll affect your grade, Bob. I promise.” I nod, thinking about it. O’Connor begins to breathe regularly.