John Cheever: Falconer

"I'm dying, Zeke, I'm dying," said Chicken Number Two. "I can feel that I'm dying, but it ain't done my brain no harm, it ain't done my brain no harm, it ain't done my brain no harm, it ain't done my brain no harm." He slept.

Farragut remained where he was. He heard music and voices from the radios and the TV. There was still some light in the window. Chicken Number Two woke suddenly and said, "You see, Zeke, I ain't afraid of dying at all. I know that sounds lying and when people used to say to me that because they had already tasted death they weren't afraid of death I figured they were talking with no class, no class at all. It seemed to me that you didn't have any quality when you talked like that, it was like thinking you looked beautiful in a mirror-this shit about being fearless before death ain't got no quality. How could you say you were fearless about leaving the party when it's like a party, even in stir-even franks and rice taste good when you're hungry, even an iron bar feels good to touch, it feels good to sleep. It's like a party even in maximum security and who wants to walk out of a party into something that nobody knows anything at all about? If you think like that you ain't got no class. But I feel I've been around longer than fifty-two years. I know you think I'm younger. Everybody does, but I'm really fifty-two. But take you, for instance. You ain't never done nothing for me. And then take the Cuckold, for instance. He's done everything for me. He gets me my smokes, my paper, my outside food and I get along with him fine, but I don't like him. What I'm trying to say is that I ain't learned all I know through experience. I ain't learned through experience at all. I like you and I don't like the Cuckold and it's that way all down the line and so I figure I must come into this life with the memories of some other life and so it stands that I'll be going into something else and you know what, Zeke, you know what, I can hardly wail to see what it's going to be like, I can hardly wait. I don't want to sound like one of those freaks who ain't got no class, one of those freaks who go around saying that since they have tasted death they got no fear, no fear at all. I got class. I mean like right now, right now if they were going to take me out before a firing squad I'd go out laughing-I don't mean bitter laughing or broken-hearted laughing, I mean real laughing. I'd go out there and I'd dance my soft-shoe and with luck I'd have a good hard-on and then when they got the command to fire I'd throw my arms out so as not to waste any of their ammunition, so as to get the full benefit of their banging, and then I'd go down a very happy man because I'm intensely interested in what's going to happen next, I'm very interested in what's going to happen next."

There was still a little light in the window. Dance music came from Ransome's radio and at the end of the corridor on TV he could see a group of people having trouble. An old man was intoxicated with the past. A young man was intoxicated with the future. There was a young woman who had trouble with her lovers and an old woman who could be seen hiding gin bottles in hat boxes, refrigerators and bureau drawers. Out of the window beyond their heads and shoulders Farragut could see waves breaking on a white beach and the streets of a village and the trees of a forest, but why did they all stay in one room, quarreling, when they could walk to the store or eat a picnic in the woods or go for a swim in the sea? They were free to do all of this. Why did they stay indoors? Why didn't they hear the sea calling to them as Farragut heard it calling, imagined the clearness of the brine as it fanned out over the beautiful pebbles? Chicken Number Two snored loudly or his breathing was guttural or perhaps this was the death rattle.

The instant seemed conspiratorial in its intensity. Farragut felt pursued but easily ahead of his pursuers. Cunning was needed; cunning he seemed to possess, that and tenderness. He went to the chair beside Chicken Number Two's bed and took the dying man's warm hand in his He seemed to draw from Chicken Number Two's presence a deep sense of freeness; he seemed to take something that Chicken Number Two was lovingly giving to him. He felt some discomfort in the right cheek of his buttocks, and half-standing, he saw that he had been sitting on Chicken's false teeth. "Oh, Chicken," he cried, "you bit me in the ass." His laughter was the laughter of the deepest tenderness and then he began to sob. His sobbing was convulsive and he rode it and let it run its course. He then called Tiny. Tiny came without asking any questions. "I'll get a doctor," he said. Then, seeing Chicken's naked arm with its dense and faded designs of gray tattooing, he said, "I don't think he spent no two thousand on tattoos like he said. It looks more like two hundred to me. He strangled an old woman. She had eighty-two dollars in her sugar bowl." Then he left. The light in the window was gone. The dance music and the misunderstandings on TV went on and on.

When the doctor came in he wore the same hat he had worn when he gave them short arm during the revolution. He still seemed unclean. "Call heaven," he said to Tiny. "We can't move no stiffs until twenty-two hundred," said Tiny. "That's the law." "Well, call later, then. He won't ferment. He's nothing but bones." They left and then Veronica and one of the other nurses came in with a canoe-shaped form made of light metal, which contained a long tan sack. They put Chicken into this and went away. Both the TV and Ransome's radio were giving commercials and Ransome tuned up his radio, a kindness perhaps.

Farragut stood with difficulty. Cunning was needed; cunning and the courage to take his rightful place in things as he saw them. He unzippered the sack. The noise of the zipper was some plainsong- some matter-of-fact memory of closing suitcases, toilet kits and clothes bags before you went to catch the plane. Bending over the sack, his arms and shoulders readied for some weight, he found that Chicken Number Two weighed nothing at all. He put Chicken into his own bed and was about to climb into the burial sack when some chance, some luck, some memory led him to take a blade out of his razor before he lay down in the cerements and zipped them up over his face. It was very dose in there, but the smell of his grave was no more than the plain smell of am vas; the smell of some tent.

The men who came to get him must have worn rubber soles because he didn't hear them come in and didn't know they were there until he fell himself being lifted up off the floor and carried. His breath had begun to wet the cloth of his shroud and his head had begun to ache. He opened his mouth very wide to breathe, afraid that they would hear the noise he made and more afraid that the stupid animalism of his carcass would panic and that he would convulse and yell and ask to be let out. Now the cloth was wet, the wetness strengthened the stink of rubber and his face was soaked and he was panting. Then the panic passed and he heard the opening and the closing of the first two gates and felt himself being carried down the slope of the tunnel. He had never, that he remembered, been carried before. (His long-dead mother must have carried him from place to place, but he could not remember this.) The sensation of being carried belonged to the past, since it gave him an unlikely feeling of innocence and purity. How strange to be carried so late in life and toward nothing that he truly knew, freed, it seemed, from his erotic crudeness, his facile scorn and his chagrined laugh-not a fact, but a chance, something like the afternoon light on high trees, quite useless and thrilling. How strange to be living and to be grown and to be carried.

He felt the ground level off at the base of the tunnel near the delivery entrance and heard the guard at post number 8 say, "Another Indian bit the dust. What do you do with No Known Relatives or Concerned?" "NKRC's get burned cheap," said one of the carriers. Farragut heard the last prison bars open and dose and felt the uneven footing of the drive. "Don't drop him, for Christ's sake," said the first carrier. "For Christ's sake don't drop him." "Look at that fucking moon, will you?" said the second carrier. "Will you look at that tucking moon?" They would be passing the main entrance then and going toward the gate. He felt himself being put down. "Where's Charlie?" said the first carrier. "He said he'd be late," said the second. "His mother-in-law had a heart attack this morning. He's coming in his own car, but his wife had to take it to the hospital." "Well, where's the hearse?" said the first carrier. "In for a lube and an oil change," said the second. "Well, I'll be Goddamned," said the first. "Cool it, cool it," said the second. "You're getting time and a half for doing nothing. Last year, the year before, sometime before Peter bought the beauty parlor, Pete and me had to carry out a three-hundred-pounder. I always thought I could lift a hundred and fifty easy, but we had lo rest about ten times to get that NKRC out of here. We were both puffing. You wait here. I'll go up to the main building and call Charlie and see where he is." "What kind of a car's he got?" asked the first. "A wagon," said the second. "I don't know what year. Secondhand, I guess. He put a new fender on himself. He's had trouble with the distributor. I'll call him." "Wait a minute, wait a minute," said the first. "You got a match?" "Yeah," said the second. "Your face and my ass." Farragut heard a match being struck. "Thanks," said the first, and he heard the footsteps of the second walk away.