John Cheever: Falconer

If prisons were constructed to make any living thing happy it might have been cats, although the sententiousness of this observation made Farragut irritable. But the fact was that trained men with drawing boards, hod carriers, mortar and stone had constructed buildings to deny their own kind a fair measure of freedom. The cats profited most. Even the fattest of them, the sixty-pounders, could ease their way between the bars, where there were plenty of rats and mice for the hunters, lovelorn men for the tender and the teases, and franks, meatballs, day-old bread and oleomargarine to eat.

Farragut had seen the cats of Luxor, Cairo and Rome, but with everybody going around the world these days and writing cards and sometimes books about it, there wasn't much point in linking the shadowy cats of prison to the shadowy cats of the ancient world. As a dog breeder he had not much liked cats, but he had changed. There were more cats in Falconer than there were convicts, and there were two thousand convicts. Make it four thousand cats. Their smell overwhelmed everything, but they checked the rat and mouse population. Farragut had a favorite. So did everybody else-some had as many as six. Some of the men's wives brought them Kitty Chow-stuff like that. Loneliness taught the intransigent to love their cats as loneliness can change anything on earth. They were warm, they were hairy, they were living, and they gave fleeting glimpses of demonstrativeness, intelligence, uniqueness and sometimes grace and beauty. Farragut called his cat Bandit because-black and white-it had a mask like a stagecoach robber or a raccoon. "Hi, pussy," he said. He put the three pieces of bread on the floor. Bandit first licked the margarine off the bread and then, with feline niceness, ate the crusts, took a drink of water out of the toilet, finished the soft part and climbed onto Farragut's lap. His claws cut through the fatigues like the thorns of a rose. "Good Bandit, good Bandit. You know what, Bandit? My wife, my only wife, came to see me today and I don't know what in hell to think about the visit. I remember mostly watching her walk away from the place. Shit, Bandit, I love her." He worked behind the cat's ears with his thumb and third finger. Bandit purred loudly and shut his eyes. He had never figured out the cat's sex. He was reminded of the Chicanos in the visiting room. "It's a good thing you don't turn me on, Bandit. I used to have an awful time with my member. Once I climbed this mountain in the Abruzzi. Six thousand feet. The woods were supposed to be full of bears. That's why I climbed the mountain. To see the bears. There was a refuge on the top of the mountain and I got there just before dark. I went in and built a fire and ate the sandwiches I’d brought and drank some wine and got into my sleeping bag and looked around for sleep, but my Goddamned member was not in the mood for sleep at all. It was throbbing and asking where the action was, why we'd climbed this mountain with no rewards, what was my purpose and so forth. Then someone, some animal, started scratching at the door. It must have been a wolf or a bear. Except for me there wasn't anything else on the mountain. So then I said to my member, if that's a female wolf or a female bear, perhaps I can fix you up. This made it thoughtful for once, pensive, and I got to sleep but-"

Then the general alarm rang. Farragut had never heard it before and didn't know what it was called, but it was a racket, obviously meant to announce fires, riots, the climax and the end of things. It rang on and on, long after its usefulness as an announcement, a warning, an alert, an alarm, had come to an end. It sounded like some approach to craziness, it was out of control, it was in control, in possession, and then someone pulled a switch and there was that brief, brief sweetness that comes with the cessation of pain. Most of the cats had hidden and the wiser ones had taken off. Bandit was behind the toilet. Then the metal door rolled open and a bunch of guards came in, led by Tiny. They wore the yellow-waterproofs they wore for fire drill and they all carried clubs.

"Any of you got cats in your cells throw them out," said Tiny. Two cats at the end of the block, thinking perhaps that Tiny had food, came toward him. One was big, one was little. Tiny raised his club, way in the air, and caught a cat on the completion of the falling arc, tearing it in two. At the same time another guard bashed in the head of the big cat. Blood, brains and offal splattered their yellow waterproofs and the sight of carnage reverberated through Farragut’s dental work; caps, inlays, restorations, they all began to ache. He snapped his head around to see that Bandit had started for the closed door. He was pleased at this show of intelligence and by the fact that Bandit had spared him the confrontation that was going on between Tiny and Chicken Number Two; "Throw that cat out," said Tiny to Chicken. "You ain't going to kill my pussy," said Chicken. "You want six days cell lock," said Tiny. "You ain't going to kill my pussy," said Chicken. "Eight days cell lock," said Tiny. Chicken said nothing. He was hanging on to the cat. "You want the hole," said Tiny. "You want a month in the hole." "Ill come back and get it later," said one of the other men.

It was half and half. Half the cats cased the slaughter and made for the closed door. Half of them wandered around at a loss, sniffing the blood of their kind and sometimes drinking it. Two of the guards vomited and half a dozen cats got killed eating the vomit. The cats that hung around the door, waiting to be let out, were an easy target. When a third guard got sick Tiny said, "O.K., O.K., that's enough for tonight, but it don't give me back my London broil. Get the fire detail to clean this up." He signaled for the door to open and when it rolled back six or maybe ten cats escaped, giving to Farragut some reminder of the invincible.

The fire detail came in with waste cans, shovels and two lengths of hose. They sluiced down the block and shoveled up the dead cats. They sluiced down the cells as well and Farragut climbed onto h is bunk, knelt there and said: "Blessed are the meek," but he couldn't remember what came next.

Farragut was a drug addict and fell that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction. The drug he needed was a distillate of earth, air, water and fire. He was mortal and his addiction was a beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality. He had been introduced to drugs during a war on some island where the weather was suffocating, the jungle rot of his hairy parts was suppurating and the enemy were murderers. The company medic had ordered gallons of a sticky yellow cough syrup and every morning the "in" group drank a glass of this and went into combat, drugged and at peace with suffocation, suppuration and murder. This was followed by Benzedrine, and Benzedrine and his beer ration got him through the war and back to his own shores, his own home and his wife. He went guiltlessly from Benzedrine to heroin, encouraged in his addict km by almost every voice he heard. Yesterday was the age of anxiety, the age of the fish, and today, his day, his morning, was the mysterious and adventurous age of the needle. His generation was the generation of addiction. It was his school, his college, the flag under which he marched into battle. The declaration of addiction was in every paper, magazine and airborne voice. Addiction was the law of the prophets. When he began to teach, he and his department head would shoot up before the big lecture, admitting that what was expected of them from the world could be produced only by the essence of a flower. It was challenge and response. The new buildings of the university outstripped the human scale, the human imagination, the wildest human dreams. The bridges that he drove across to get to the university were the distillate of engineering computers, a sort of mechanical Holy Ghost. The planes that took him from his university to some other university arced luxuriously into an altitude where men would perish. There was no philosophical suture that could make anything but destructiveness of the sciences that were taught in the high buildings he could see from the windows of English and Philosophy. There were some men of such stupidity that they did not respond to these murderous contradictions and led lives that were without awareness and distinction. His memory of a life without drugs was like a memory of himself as a blond, half-naked youth in good flannels, walking on a white beach between the dark sea and a rank of leonine granite, and to seek out such a memory was contemptible. A life without drugs seemed in fact and in spirit a remote and despicable point in his past-binoculars upon telescopes, lens grating lens, employed to pick out a figure of no consequence on a long gone summer's day.