Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

We said nothing during the twenty-minute ride to town.

A woman on the elevator at the courthouse glanced at me once on the ride up to the third floor. She quickly looked away. I was a stinking, handcuffed beast.

The elevator door opened and the first person I saw was my father. He stood in the hall smiling widely when he saw me. I couldn’t move my face for fear I would burst into tears and humiliate myself and him. I was in shock. I followed the deputy and just stared at my dad when we walked by him. His face dropped when he saw the grief on mine.

The magistrate said the deputy could take off my cuffs. I sat down while he explained that my dad had put up his apartment for my bail and what that meant. If I broke any of the provisions of my bail, the government would seize my parents’ property. Did I understand?

I nodded.

Would I agree to the restrictions of the bail? No travel outside my county without direct permission from him?

I said yes.

“Okay,” he said. “The police will take you back to the jail so you can be processed out.”

“Back to jail?” I said.

“Yes. To be out-processed.”

“Oh.”

The deputy had to do something else, and while I waited for another cop, they put me in the holding cell down the hall. I paced around the cell for an hour, pissed off. I was technically free—why was I locked up?

Fred, the state cop I had met the night of the bust, came down the hall with a deputy. The deputy unlocked the door and Fred said, “Come on, Mason. I’ll take you back to jail.”

Fred cuffed me, for the sake of the deputy, but took the cuffs off when he stopped at a light a few blocks from the courthouse. “Seems silly to have you cuffed when you’re a free man, don’t you think?”

“Yes. Thanks.” I reached into my shirt pocket and got a cigarette.

“How you feeling?” Fred said.

“Like I’ve been beaten to a pulp.”

“Nobody hit you, did they?”

“No,” I said. “These beatings are strictly self-inflicted.”

I didn’t have to go back to the cell. I just signed out. They gave me my wallet and my watch and my toothbrush. I walked out the glass doors. Nobody even noticed. Law: you are a crook and have to stay inside. Now you are a crook on bail: you may leave. The sun was setting. I looked up and saw my dad waving from a cab. I walked over and got in.

“I’ve got to catch a plane back to Fort Lauderdale,” Dad said. “You want to ride along?”

“Sure. I’ll have the cab take me to the bus station,” I said.

We drove to the airport. I chattered like a machine gun, telling Dad about the bust and how Dave had fucked up and on and on with an intensity arising from the relief of release, I guess. Dad nodded, but didn’t say anything. When I saw the airport signs, I said, “Well. I guess this is about the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

My father looked at me, nodding grimly. “I’ll say.”

When he got out at the airport, I got out with him to say good-bye and to thank him for doing so much for me. I tried to hug him, something that is not done in my family. But he couldn’t. As he walked into the airport, I said, “Thanks, Dad.”

He nodded and smiled and disappeared into the airport lobby.

The cabby took me to the Charleston Greyhound bus stop at six. The clerk said the next bus to Jacksonville was leaving at eleven. I sat in the waiting room for five hours, feeling miserable. I was coming down with something. Maybe the flu. I had a fever, congestion, a cough. I wanted to sleep, but there’s nothing in a Greyhound bus station but chairs.

At three in the morning, I was in Jacksonville waiting for a bus to take me to Gainesville.

At seven, I got off the bus in downtown Gainesville and saw Patience waiting outside the station. Her face lit up when she saw me.

She ran to me and we hugged. “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

CHAPTER 21

I was knocked out of commission for a week with the flu. I believe now that it was my body’s reaction to the stress.

One by one, our friends learned I had been arrested in South Carolina. They were amazed. I just didn’t look like a smuggler, they said. I reminded them that murderers look normal, too, just to put their thoughts in perspective.

Patience wanted to quit the paper route because it was destroying the new Rabbit. We couldn’t, that was our only income. We sold the school bus for $750, which kept us alive for another month.

Jack seemed unaffected when I sold the bus, his room. He was quite stoic. Patience had said he was shocked when she told him I’d been arrested. When I got home, he was reassuring and laughed at my stories of life in a county jail. He was protecting us, I believe. He didn’t want us to feel any worse than we did.

I had a real problem concentrating. In the mornings I worked on my robot book because I believed, or hoped, that I could write and if I kept at it, I would eventually succeed. When I began to lose this conviction, Patience would remind me. If someone is working to support you by running a paper route and encourages you to stay home and plink on a typewriter, how can you not be a believer?

One afternoon my agent, Knox, called.