Chickenhawk: Back in the World

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.