John Cheever - Falconer

"I don't know."

"I count on you, said the cashier to the cash register."

Farragut hurled himself onto his bunk and gave an impersonation of a man tormented by confinement, racked with stomach cramps and sexual backfires. He tore at his scalp with his nails, scratched his thighs and his chest and mumbled to Bumpo between groans, "Riot at The Wall. Twenty-eight hostages by the balls. Their balls equal freedom and amnesty." He howled, bucked with his pelvis and then buried his face in the pillow, under which he could feel the beginnings of his radio, safe, he guessed, because with the staff half dead, scared and thinned, he'd bet by sick call there wouldn't be any search for contraband.

"You're a great cash register," said Bumpo clearly. "Why did the raisin look sad?"

"Because he's a dried prune?" asked Farragut.

"No. Because he's a worried grape," said Bumpo.

"No talking," said Goldfarb.

Then Farragut couldn't remember what he had done with the typewriter key he had sharpened and used to cut wire. If it was found, classed as a shiv and traced back to him with fingerprints., he could get another three years. He tried to reenact all his movements in Marshack's office: he counted the plants, heard Toledo speak about the pounds of flesh, went off to his office and sharpened the key. He had cut the wire, stuffed it into his pants, but haste and anxiety obscured what he had done with the key. He had turned off the lights, limped up the tunnel and explained to someone who didn't exist that the humidity gave him rheumatism. He didn't worry about the plants and the wire-it was the key that could incriminate him. But where was the key? On the floor by a plant, stuck into some soil or left on Marshack's desk? The key, the key! He couldn't remember. He could remember that Marshack had said he wouldn't be back until four on Monday, but having said Monday he could not remember the day of the week. Yesterday had been short arm or was it the day before or the day before that when the Cuckold had swiped Chicken's Bible. He didn't know. Then Tiny relieved Goldfarb and read an announcement that opened with a date and Farragut was given the news that this was Saturday. He could worry later about the key.

Tiny announced that all inmates who wanted to be photographed should shave, dress and be ready when their turn came. Everybody on the block had signed up, even the Stone. Farragut observed the success of this maneuver. It did diffuse their explosive unrest. He guessed that a man walking to the electric chair would be happy to pick his nose. Calmly and even happily they shaved, washed their armpits, dressed and waited.

"I want to play cards with the Stone," said Ransome. "I want to play cards with the Stone."

"He don’t know how to play cards," said Tiny.

"He wants to play cards," said Ransome. "Look at him." The Stone was smiling and nodding, as he would for anything. Tiny sprang Ransome, who carried his chair into the corridor and sat down opposite the Stone with a deck of cards. "One for you and one for me," he said.

Then Chicken began to strike his guitar and sing:

There is twenty-eight bottles Hanging on the wail. And if one of them bottles Started to fall.

They'd be twenty-seven bottles Hanging on the wall. And if one of them bottles Started to fall…

Tiny blew. "You want Chisholm in here with that bone-breaking hose crew?"

"No, no, no," said Chicken. "I don't want nothing like that. That ain't what I want. If I was on the grievance committee, whatever that is, one of the first things I'd bring up is the visiting room. Now, they tell me it's a lot better than the visiting room at The Wall, but even so, if I had some chick come in to visit me I wouldn't want to meet her over a counter like I was trying to sell her something. If some chick come in to visit me-"

"You been in here twelve years," shouted Tiny, "and you ain't never once had a visitor. Never once, not ever in twelve years."

"Maybe I had a visitor when you was on vacation," said Chicken. "Maybe I had a visitor when you had that hernia operation. You was out six weeks."

"That was ten years ago."

"Well, as I say, if some chick come to visit me I wouldn't want to have her sweet-talk me across a counter. I'd like to sit down with her at a table with an ashtray for butts and maybe offer her a soft drink."

"They got soft-drink machines."

"But at a table, Tiny, at a table. You can't have no kind of intimacy across a counter. If I could talk to my chick across this table, well, then I'd feel contented and not want to hurt nobody or start no trouble."

"In twelve years nobody come to see you. That proves that there ain't nobody on the street who knows your name. Even your own mother don't know who you are. Sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, friends, chicks-you ain't got nothing to sit down at a table with. You is worse than dead. You shit. The dead don't shit."

Chicken began to cry then or seemed to cry, to weep or seemed to weep, until they heard the sound of a grown man weeping, an old man who slept on a charred mattress, whose life savings in tattoos had faded to a tracery of ash, whose crotch hair was sparse and gray, whose flesh hung slack on his bones, whose only trespass on life was a flat guitar and a remembered and pitiful air of "I don't know where it is, sir, but m find it, sir," and whose name was known nowhere, nowhere in the far reaches of the earth or in the far reaches of his memory, where, when he talked to himself, he talked to himself as Chicken Number Two.

The chow bell rang past one and they got the order for single file at ten paces and went down the tunnel past the guards, who looked sicker, chow was two sandwiches, one with cheese and the other with nothing but margarine. The KP was a stranger and wouldn't talk. A little after three, back in their cells, they were ordered to the education building, and single file, ten paces apart, they went there.

The education building was no longer much used. Budget cuts and a profound suspicion of the effects of education on a criminal intelligence had put out most of its lights and left it a ghostly place. On their left, unlighted, was the ghostly typewriter classroom, where eight huge, ancient and unused machines gathered dust. There were no instruments in the music room, but there was a clef, a staff and some notes drawn on the blackboard. In the dark history class, lighted only from the hall, Farragut read on the blackboard: "The new imperialism ended in 1905 to be followed by…" That could have been written ten or twenty years ago. The last classroom on the left was lighted and there was a stir there and over Ransome's and Bumpo’s shoulders Farragut could see two bright lights on skeletal poles beamed at a plastic fir tree, blazing with ornaments. Beneath the tree were square and rectangular boxes, wrapped professionally with colored paper and brilliant ribbons. The intelligence or the craft of the hand that had set this scene filled Farragut with the deepest admiration. He listened for the clash of men, the sirens, the roar of mortal enemies, tearing at one another's heads, but this was gone, conquered by the balm of the plastic tree, glittering with crown jewels and surrounded by treasure. He imagined the figure he would cut, standing in his white shirt beside the boxes filled with cashmere sweaters, silk shins, sable hats, needlepoint bed slippers and large jewels suitable for a man. He saw himself in the curious spectrum of color photography being taken out of an envelope by his wife and his son in the hallway at Indian Hill. He saw the rug, the table, the bowl of roses reflected in the mirror as they regarded their shame, their bad penny, their fouled escutcheon, their nemesis posed in stunning color beside a truly beautiful tree!

There was a long, battered table in the corridor, with forms to be filled out that must have been manufactured in the street by some intelligent agent. The form explained that one photograph would be mailed cost-free to a recipient designated by the inmate. The recipient should be a member of the family, but common-law wives and homosexual unions were acceptable. A second print and the negative would be delivered to Falconer, but any duplicates would be made at the inmate’s own expense. Farragut printed: "Mrs. Ezekiel Farragut. Indian Hill. Southwick, Connecticut. 06998." He printed a form for the Stone, whose name was Serafino DeMarco and whose address was in Brooklyn. Then he stepped into the brightly lighted room with the presents and the tree.