All the twigs and leaves and grass clippings I’ve trimmed are now lying, in horrible disarray, in the plant beds. I rake every inch of the dirt, leaving careful parallel marks in the sand running smartly, perpendicularly, from the walls to the grass.
Then—I’m finished? I check my new Casio watch I bought at the commissary. It’s only two o’clock. Simpson works us until three. I see Simpson driving toward me on the service road. I put my rake on my shoulder and go fetch my bucket while Simpson drives by. He nods to let me know I’m doing okay. Of course I’m doing okay. I’m good at this stuff.
I’m sensitive to the proper order of grass and leaves and twigs and dirt; Dorm Four will look like a Zen garden someday.
I notice that my predecessor, an aesthetic dullard, has let the grass grow up wildly around each and every one of the hundreds of white-painted stones that line the border of the service road and my grass. I begin working to correct the problem.
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.
Patience and Alice were standing in the crowd of wives who were greeting their men. I went to her and we hugged. We kissed our official greeting kiss. I followed her to the table she and Alice had prepared for us. This being their third visit, they now knew the ropes—the ins and outs of visiting your man at Eglin. They had brought in a big bowl of fresh fruit, half a dozen croissants, yogurt, instant Bustelo coffee, and more, and that was just for breakfast. Patience showed me the new freezer chest she’d bought, inside of which were the makings of a gourmet lunch.
The sight of all this plenty was both heartening and depressing. I like this kind of food—it was just that it offered the contrast that I was able to avoid when I was in camp tending Dorm Four. Here in the visiting room, the fact that I was a prisoner in a prison—whose wife worked cleaning houses to support herself and our son (she had not yet gotten enough of the money I’d made on the book to quit) and drove two hundred miles and camped out in a tent at a nearby campground—was obvious. It made the punishment all the more painful.
After coffee and a croissant, Patience and I went outside and walked laps on the concrete path around the yard. I told her of my adventures as keeper of the grounds around Dorm Four, which she took to be funny.
Patience told me how nice everyone was back in High Springs. We’d wondered how the people of High Springs, a small (population five thousand) rural southern town, would react to the news that I was a convicted drug smuggler—and had been walking, unknown as such, among them for two years. It turned out they were very supportive. One man told me, just before I’d left for prison, that I shouldn’t worry. “Hell, Bob, there’s a lot of people in this town made their living making moonshine. People understand about pot. You don’t have to worry about nothing.” Another man, Bob Ryan, who operated the country store up the road from us, sent this message with Patience: “Tell Bob I’m feeling real safe now; knowing he’s up there in prison and not able to sneak into my house some night while I’m asleep and stuff one of them marijuana cigarettes in my mouth.” Patience told me she’d met a couple—Mike Costello, a Vietnam veteran, and his wife, Patti Street, who had been one of Jack’s teachers. Mike had written a novel about Vietnam called A Long Time from Home, which he was in the process of getting published. She told me Mike was cutting firewood for her so she’d be ready for winter. Patience had passed a petition around town, which hundreds of people signed, and sent it to Judge Sol Blatt, asking him to give me an alternative sentence.