Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Johnson stopped at another big metal door and pushed a buzzer. A pair of eyes peeked through a small barred window. We heard the door click, watched it open. A black guard shook his head and said “I don’t know where they expect we’re gonna put these fuckers” and made a sour expression.

“Always room for one more in the federal wing, Porter,” Johnson said, laughing. We walked in through the door as the guard. Porter, waved us inside. On the other side of the door, we waited while he slammed the big door shut, watching Johnson’s face disappear in the narrowing gap. I had the strange feeling that I missed Johnson already. We’d known him longer than anyone else here. We were newborn jailbirds, and just naturally took to the first face we saw.

Porter, our new guard, motioned for us to move down the hall. One side of the hall had windows every ten feet that looked out onto a weedy chain-link-fenced exercise yard. The other side was a wall of steel bars. Four feet behind the bars, across a sort of open-air hallway, there were more steel bars with doors every eight feet, doors to dark cages with men glowering in them. Farther down the hallway, a television sitting on a wheeled stand blared into a large barred room filled with men and gray metal tables. About thirty men, dressed in the same kind of rags we wore, were sitting or lying on the tables. The guard stopped at the TV, which was beyond arm’s reach of the prisoners, and switched the channel abruptly. Men yelled and booed behind the bars. One guy said, “Hey, Porter. There’s nothing on that fucking channel.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Porter said. “I said you watch channel four. That’s what you watch.” He pushed the television farther away from the bars. “How you changing the channel, anyway?”

“Fuck you Porter,” somebody said. Porter seemed not to notice and put a key in a lock on the door of the barred dayroom and opened it. He looked at us watching him. I think we had the sort of looks on our faces that said, You mean, go in there? Us? “C’mon,” Porter said. “Get in there. Let’s go.”

We walked inside.

Porter locked the door behind us.

We stood just inside the room, each clutching a blanket against his chest, staring at the men.

The men stared at us. They were mostly black men. With our deep suntans from forty-four days of sailing, we were still lily-whites. Lily-white motherfuckers, as one man near the shower stall at the back of the room muttered. One of them, a big black guy who sat on the table nearest us, said, “What you want? Somebody to show you your fucking room?”

“Yeah,” John said, stepping forward. “Where we supposed to sleep?”

The black guy studied John quickly, probably checking his size and the general condition of his muscles. John was in great shape, as well as big, and the guy was impressed. He smiled a little and pointed over his shoulder. “Down the hall.”

“Any particular room?” John said.

“Naw. Take your pick,” the guy said. “Life’s good in the federal wing. You can do anything you want here.” He laughed. The half dozen men sitting on the table nearest the television in the hall, which was flickering, blaring about using Tide for your laundry, laughed.

We walked out of the large dayroom and into the barred hallway. We checked out the cells, looking for a home. They were all filled with black men who just stared at us, not saying anything, not looking friendly. The third cell had three white guys in it, and we went in.

We stood there watching the men, waiting for something to happen. There were eight bunks—steel shelves hung out from the walls on chains with thin pads on them, four on each side. The space between the bunks was about four feet. At the back of the cell, between the two bottom bunks, the builders had crammed in a lidless and seatless commode. A white guy lying on the top bunk near the door reading a book said, “You got your choice of those two next to the shitter and the one over there,” pointing to the top bunk at the back. He turned a page and resumed reading.

We looked at each other and shrugged. Ireland collapsed onto a bottom bunk and hugged his blanket. I threw my blanket on the shelf across from Ireland. John threw his blanket on the top bunk. While Ireland groaned, John and I went back to the dayroom.

A dreamy-eyed, loopy young redneck told us that you just went to the bars and screamed out what you wanted when we asked him how you got to a phone or wanted medical attention.

“Who’s listening? When you yell?” I said.

“I dunno,” the loopy redneck said. “They hear you. Speaker talks back.”

John walked to the bars and yelled, “Hey. We want to make phone calls.”

Loopy came over to John and said, “They got one here.” He pointed to a phone on a table. “Local calls only, though.”

John nodded. “Thanks. I don’t know anybody around here.”

Loopy nodded and wandered off to sit with the guys watching the television through the bars.

“Hey!” John yelled into the hallway, his hands cupped to his mouth. “We want to make phone calls.”