John Cheever - Falconer

Everybody had radios. When they got back to their cells Chicken turned on some loud dance music and stretched out on his cot, smiling. "Kick it, Chicken," Farragut shouted, hoping that if the radio was still no one would notice it. That was dumb because the problem must have been clear to about everyone. Ten minutes later they got the announcement. "ALL RADIOS ARE TO BE TURNED IN TO THE CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR TUNE-UP AND FREE REPAIR. ALL RADIOS ARE TO BE TURNED IN TO THE CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR TUNE-UP AND FREE REPAIR." Tiny went down the cellblock and collected the radios. There were groans and oaths and the Cuckold tossed his radio through the bars to smash on the floor. "You feeling good today, Bumpo?" Farragut asked. "You feeling good today, you think today is a good day?" "No," said Bumpo, “I never liked this humid weather." He didn't know, then. The phone rang. There was a message for Farragut. He was to get down to the office and cut two dittos. Marshack would wait for him in the squad room.

The tunnel was deserted. Farragut had never seen it empty. They might all be locked in, but he listened for the sounds of the inevitable rebellion that would follow the riot at The Wall. In the distance he thought he heard shouting and screaming, but when he stopped and tried to decipher the sound he decided it could be the sound of traffic outside the walls. There was a faint siren now and then, but they blew sirens all the time in the civilian world. As he approached the squad room he heard a radio. "Inmates have demanded an injunction against physical and administrative reprisals and a general amnesty," he heard. Then the radio was cut. They had either heard him or timed his arrival. Four officers were sitting around a radio in the squad room. There were two quarts of whiskey on the desk. The looks they gave him were blank and hateful. Marshack-he had small eyes and a shaven skull-gave him two pieces of paper. Farragut went down the hall to his office and slammed shut the glass-and-chicken-wire door. As soon as his door was closed he heard the radio again. "Sufficient force is available to recapture the institution at any time. The question is whether the lives of twenty-eight innocent men is a weighty enough ransom to purchase amnesty for nearly two thousand convicted criminals. In the morning…" Farragut looked up and saw Marshack’s shadow on the glass door. He slammed open a desk drawer, ripped out a ditto sheet and put it as noisily as possible into the machine. He watched the shadow of Marshack slide down the glass to where he could, crouched, see through the keyhole. Farragut shook the papers vigorously and read the messages, written in pencil in a child's scrawl. "All personnel is to show top strength in all gatherings. No strength, no gatherings." That was the first. The second read: "Louisa Pierce Spingarn, in memory of her beloved son Peter, has arranged for interested inmates to be photographed in full color beside a decorated Christmas tree and to have said photographs…" Marshack opened the door and stood there, the executioner, the power of endings.

"What is this, Sergeant?" Farragut asked. "What is this thing about a Christmas tree?"

"I don't know, I don't know," said Marshack. "She's a fucking do-gooder, I guess. They cause all the trouble. Efficiency is all that matters and when you don't get efficiency you get shit."

"I know," said Farragut, "but what's this all about a Christmas tree?"

"I don't know the whole story," Marshack said, "but this broad, this Spingarn, had a son who I think died in prison. Not in this country but in someplace like India or Japan. Maybe it was in some war. I don't know. So she thinks about prisons a lot and she goes to some mark in the Department of Correction and she gives them this money so that you assholes can be photographed in full color standing beside a Christmas tree and then have these pictures mailed to your families if any of you got families, which I doubt. It's a terrible waste of money."

"When did she make this arrangement?"

"Oh, I don't know. A long time ago. Years ago, maybe. Somebody just remembered about it this afternoon. It's just something to keep you assholes busy. Next thing they'll have needle-threading contests with cash prizes. Cash prizes for the boob who shits the biggest turd. Cash prizes for anything, just to keep you busy."

Marshack sat on the edge of the desk. Why, Farragut wondered, did he shave his skull? Nits? A shaved skull was associated in Farragut's mind with Prussians, cruelty and executioners. Why should a prison guard aim at this? On the evidence of his shaved skull Farragut guessed that if Marshack were on the barricades at The Wall he would gun down a hundred men with no excitement and no remorse. The shaved skulls, Farragut thought, will always be with us. They are easily recognized but impossible to alter or cure. Farragut longed fleetingly for class structures and benighted hierarchies. They could exploit the shaved heads. Marshack was stupid. Stupidity was his greatest usefulness; his vocation. He was very useful. He was indispensable at greasing machinery and splicing BX cables and he would be a courageous and fierce mercenary in some border skirmish if someone more sophisticated gave the order to attack. There would be some universal goodness in the man-he would give you a match for your cigarette and save you a seat at the movies-but there was no universality to his lack of intelligence. Marshack might respond to the sovereignty of love, but he could not master geometry and he should not be asked to. Farragut put him down as a killer.

"I'm getting out of here at four," Marshack said. "I ain't never been so anxious to get out of no place in my whole life. I'm getting out of here at four and I'm going to go home and drink a whole bottle of Southern Comfort and if I feel like it I'm going to drink another bottle and if I can't forget everything I seen and felt around here in the last couple of hours I'll drink another. I won't have to come back here until four on Monday and I'm going to be drunk all the time. Long ago when they first invented the atomic bomb people used to worry about its going off and killing everybody, but they didn't know that mankind has got enough dynamite right in his guts to tear the fucking planet to pieces. Me, I know."

"Why did you take this job?"

"I don't know why I took this job. It was my uncle told me. He was my father's older brother. My father believed everything he said. So he said I should get a peaceful job in the jailhouse, retire in twenty years on half pay and begin a new life at forty with a guaranteed income. Do anything. Open up a parking lot. Grow oranges. Run a motel. Only he didn't know that in a place like this you get so tensed up that you can't digest a Lifesaver. I threw up my lunch. We had a good meal for once-chickpeas and chicken wings-and I threw up the whole mess, right on the floor. I can't keep nothing on my stomach. Another twenty minutes and I'm walking to my car and I'm driving my car home to 327 Hudson Street and I'm getting my bottle of Southern Comfort out of the top of the closet and my glass from the kitchen and I'm going to forget everything. When you type those out put them in my office. It's the one with the plants. The door's open. Toledo 'll pick them up.

He closed the glass door. The radio was dead. Farragut typed: LOUISA PIERCE SRINGARN, IN MEMORY OF HER BELOVED SON PETER, HAS ARRANGED FOR INTERESTED INMATES TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED IN FULL COLOR BESIDE A DECORATED CHRISTMAS TREE AND TO HAVE SAID PHOTOGRAPHS MAILED AT NO COST TO THE INMATE'S LOVED ONES. PICTURE-TAKING WILL BEGIN AT 900/8/27 IN THE ORDER OP RECEIVED APPLICATIONS. WHITE SHIRTS ALLOWABLE DON'T BRING NOTHING BUT A HANDKERCHIEF.

Farragut turned off his light, closed the door and walked down t he tunnel to the open door of Marshack’s office. The room had three windows and it was the one, as Marshack had said, with the plants. The windows had vertical bars outside, but Marshack had put horizontal rods on the inside and many plants hung from these. There were twenty or thirty hanging plants. Hanging plants, Farragut thought, were the beloved of the truly lonely-those men and women who, burning with lust, ambition and nostalgia, watered their hanging plants. They cultivated their hanging plan is and he guessed that they talked to them since they talked to everything else-doors, tables and the wind up the chimney. He recognized very few of the plants. Ferns he knew; ferns and geraniums. He picked a geranium leaf, broke it in his fingers and smelted the oil. It smelted like a geranium-the stuffy, complex perfume of some lived-in and badly ventilated interior. There were many other kinds with leaves of all shapes, some of them the color of red cabbage and some of them dull browns and yellows-not the lambent autumnal spectrum, but the same spectrum of death, fixed in the nature of the plant. He was pleased and surprised to see that the killer, narrowly confined by his stupidity, had tried to change the bleakness of the room where he worked with plants that lived and grew and died, that depended upon his attention and his kindness, that had at least the fragrance of moist soil and that in their greenness and their life stood for the valleys and pastures of milk and honey. All the plants hung from copper wire. Farragut had built radios when he was young. He remembered that a hundred feet of copper wire was the beginning of a radio set.