John Cheever - Falconer

"But." said Chicken.

"There's one," said Tiny.

"Religious hypocrite," said the Cuckold.

"Two," said Tiny wearily.

Chicken clapped the Bible over his heart as some men put their hats over their hearts when the flag is passing by. He raised his face into the light of that late August afternoon. Tennis was crying. "Honestly I don't remember. If I could remember I'd tell you. If I'd known who it was I'd kill him."

It was a long time before the doctor gave up on Tennis and wrote him a prescription. Then one by one the others exhibited themselves and were checked off the roster. Farragut felt hungry, and glancing at his watch, saw how late it had gotten. It was an hour past chow. Tiny and the doctor were arguing about something on the roster. Tiny had locked the cells after the Cuckold grabbed the Bible and they stood naked, waiting to get back into their cells and into their clothes.

The light in the prison, that late in the day, reminded Farragut or some forest he had skied through on a winter afternoon. The perfect diagonal of the light was cut by bars as trees would cut the light in some wood, and the largeness and mysteriousness of the place was like the largeness of some forest-some tapestry of knights and unicorns-where a succinct message was promised but where nothing was spoken but the vastness. The slanting and broken light, swimming with dust, was also the dolorous light of churches where a bereft woman with a hidden face stood grieving. But in his darling snowy forest there would be an everlasting newness in the air, and here there was nothing but the bestial goat smell of old Farragut and the gall of having been gulled. They had been gulled. They had gulled themselves. The word from The Wall-and it was known to most of them-had promised them the thrust, the strength of change, and this had been sapped by quarrels about clap and prayer books and wrist-watch straps.

Farragut felt impotent. No girl, no ass, no mouth could get him up, but he felt no gratitude for this cessation of his horniness. The last light of that sweaty day was whitish, the white afterglow you see in the windows of Tuscan paintings, an ending light but one that seems to bring the optical nerve, the powers of discernment, to a climax. Naked, utterly unbeautiful, malodorous and humiliated by a clown in a dirty suit and a dirty hat, they seemed to Farragut, in this climax of the light, to be criminals. None of the cruelties of their early lives-hunger, thirst and beatings-could account for their brutality', their self-destructive thefts and their consuming and perverse addictions. They were souls who could not be redeemed, and while penance was a clumsy and a cruel answer, it was some measure of the mysteriousness of their fall. In the white light they seemed to Farragut to be fallen men.

They dressed. It was dark. Chicken began to scream, "Chow. Chow. Chow." Most of the others joined in on the chant. "No chow," said Tiny. "Kitchen's closed for repairs." "Three squares a day is our constitutional right," screamed Chicken. "We'll get a writ of habeas corpus. We'll get twenty writs…" Then he began to shout; "TV. TV. TV." Almost everyone joined in on this. “TV's broken," said Tiny. This lie increased the loudness of the chanting and Farragut, weary with hunger and everything else, found himself sinking, with no resistance at all, into a torpor that was the worst of his positions of retreat. Down he seemed to go, his shoulders rounded and his neck bent, down into a lewd and putrescent nothingness. He breathed, but that seemed to be all he did. The din of the shouting only made his torpor more desirable, the noises worked on him like the blessing of some destructive drug, and he saw his brain cells like the cells of a honeycomb being destroyed by an alien solvent. Then Chicken set fire to his mattress and began to blow on the small flames and ask men to pass him paper to keep the fire going. Farragut barely heard him. They passed up toilet paper, hoarded announcements and letters from home. Chicken blew so hard on the flames that he blew out all h is teeth-uppers and lowers. When he got these back into place he began to yell-Farragut barely heard him-"Set fire to your mattress, burn the fucking place down, watch the flames leap, see them coughing to death, see the flames shoot up through the roof, see them burning, see them burning and crying." Farragut heard this remotely, but he distinctly heard Tiny pick up the phone and ask: "Red Alert." Then Tiny shouted: "Well, what the hell did you tell me you got a Red Alert for when you ain't got no Red Alert. Well, all right-I got them all yelling and throwing stuff around and setting fire to their mattresses, so why ain't my cellblock just as dangerous as C and B? Just because I ain't got no millionaires and governors in here don't mean that my cellblock ain't as dangerous as some other cellblock. I got all the boobs in here and it's like a dynamite cap. I tell you they're burning their mattresses. Well, don't tell me you got this Red Alert when you're drinking whiskey in the squad room. All right, you're scared. So am I. I'm human. I could use a drink. Well, all right, then, but step on it."

"CELL BLOCK E UNDER RED ALERT. CELL BLOCK E UNDER RED ALERT." That was ten minutes later. Then the door rolled open and they came in, eighteen of them wearing masks and yellow waterproofs, armed with clubs and gas cans. Two men got the hose off the rack and aimed it at the block. They moved clumsily. It could be the waterproofs or maybe they were drunk. Chisholm pulled off his mask and got the bullhorn. Chisholm was drunk and frightened. His features were all wrong, like a face reflected in moving water. He had the brows of one man, the mouth of another and the thin, bitter voice of a third. "Stand at attention by your doors or you'll get the hose and you'll get it like a bunch of sticks with nails in them, you'll get it like stones, you'll get it like a rod of iron. Put out your fire, Chicken, and get it through your heads that you men is powerless. This place is surrounded with armed troops from all over the state. We got the power to scatter your fire wherever you light it. You is powerless. Now put out your mattress, Chicken, and sleep in your own mess. Blow out their lights, Tiny. Sweet dreams."

They were gone, the door closed and it was dark. Chicken was whimpering. "Don't sleep, nobody, don't nobody close their eyes. You close your eyes they'll kill you. They'll kill you in your sleep. Don't nobody go to sleep."

In the blessed dark Farragut got his copper wire and his toilet paper roll and began to build his radio. How beautiful the wire seemed, a slender, clean, gold-colored tie to the world of the living, from which he seemed to hear, now and then, the clash of men, the roar of men tearing at one another's heads. It came and went and he dismissed it as an illusion, compared at least to the splendor of building, out of paper and wire, some bond or lock or shining buckle that could fasten two worlds. When it was done he sighed like a gratified lover and mumbled: "Praise be to Thee, O Lord." Chicken was still whimpering: "Don't go to sleep, nobody. Nobody goes to sleep." Farragut slept heavily.

When Farragut woke he saw through the poor light and the dark sky that the weather had not changed. A thunderstorm or a strong northwest wind might break it or it might taper off into a ten-hour rain and a slow clearing. He saw, at the window, that Chisholm had lied. There were no troops around the walls. Had there been troops there he would have heard the noise, he would have felt the stir of troops. There was nothing, and he felt disappointed. Perhaps there were no troops to spare. The heaviness of the air was depressing and he smelted worse. So did Bumpo and Tennis. A reproduction of the ditto he had typed was stuck between the bars. LOUISA FIERCE SPINGARN, IN MEMORY OF HER BELOVED SON PETER…The chow bell rang at seven. Goldfarb was on duty. "Single file," he shouted, "single file and ten paces between youse. Single file." They lined up at the door and when it opened, Goldfarb parceled them out at ten paces, all excepting the Stone, who had left his glass ear in the cell and couldn't be made to understand, Goldfarb shouted at him, roared at him, and raised ten fingers in the air, but the Stone only smiled and hunkered after the ass of Ransome, who was ahead. He wasn't going to be left alone, not for a minute, Goldfarb let him go. In the tunnel to the mess hall Farragut saw the precautions he had typed. ALL PERSONNEL IS TO SHOW TOP STRENGTH IN ALL GATHERINGS. All along the tunnel at regular intervals were guards in waterproofs with truncheons and gas cans. The few faces that Farragut saw-seemed more haggard than the prisoners'. In the mess hall a tape was playing: "EAT STANDING UP IN YOUR PLACE IN LINE. EAT STANDING UP IN YOUR PLACE IN LINE. NO TALKING…" Breakfast was tea, last night's meat scraps and a hard-boiled egg. "Coffee they don't got," a KP said. "They got nothing. Last night's delivery man leaked the news. They still got twenty-eight hostages by the balls. Amnesty they want. Pass it along. I been dishing out this shit for twelve hours. My feet are living but the rest of me's dead." Farragut wolfed his meat and his egg, dropped his tray and spoon into the dirty water and went back to his block with his neighbors. Clang. "What did the cashier say to the cash register?'' said Bumpo.