Falconer

by John Cheever

  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 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 MAILED AT NO COST TO THE INMATE’S LOVED ONES. PICTURE-TAKING WILL BEGIN AT 9OO/8/27 IN THE ORDER OF RECEIVED APPLICATIONS. WHITE SHIRTS ALLOWABLE. DON’T BRING NOTHING BUT A HANDKERCHIEF.

  Farragut turned off his light, closed the door and walked down the 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 plants 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 smelled the oil. It smelled 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.

  Farragut unhooked a plant from a curtain rod and w
ent after the copper wire. Marshack had looped the wire through holes in the pots, but he had used the wire so generously that it would take Farragut an hour or more to get the wire he needed. Then he heard footsteps. He stood in front of the floored plant, a little frightened, but it was only Toledo. Farragut passed him the ditto sheets and gave him a strong interrogative eye. “Yeah, yeah,” said Toledo. He spoke not in a whisper but in a very flat voice. “They got twenty-eight hostages. That’s at least two thousand eight hundred pounds of flesh, and they can make every ounce of it sing.” Toledo was gone.

  Farragut returned to his desk, broke the least-used key from the typewriter, honed it on the old granite of the wall, thinking of the ice age and its contribution to the hardness of the stone. When he had the key honed to a hair edge, he went back to Marshack’s office and cut the wire off eighteen plants. He put the wire in his underpants, turned off the lights and walked back up the empty tunnel. He walked clumsily with the wire in his pants and if anyone had questioned him about his limp he would have said that the shitty humid day gave him rheumatism.

  “734–508–32 reporting in,” he said to Tiny.

  “What’s the news?”

  “Beginning tomorrow at nine hundred any asshole who wants to be photographed in full color standing beside a Christmas tree has got his wish.”

  “No shit,” said Tiny.

  “I’m not shitting you,” said Farragut. “You’ll get the announcement in the morning.”

  Farragut, loaded with copper wire, sat down on his cot. He would hide it under the mattress as soon as Tiny’s back was turned. He unwound the toilet paper from its roll, folded the paper into neat squares and put this in his copy of Descartes. When he had made radios as a boy he had wound the wire on an oatmeal box. He guessed a toilet paper roll would be nearly as good. The bedspring would work for an aerial, the ground was the radiator, Bumpo’s diamond was the diode crystal and the Stone had his earphones. When this was completed he would be able to get continuous news from The Wall. Farragut was terribly excited and highly composed. The public address system made him jump. “SHORT ARM FOR CELLBLOCK F IN TEN MINUTES. SHORT ARM FOR CELLBLOCK F IN TEN MINUTES.”

  Short arm was, for the calendar freaks, the first Thursday of every month. It was for the rest of them whenever it was announced. Farragut guessed that short arm, along with the Christmas tree, was a maneuver to dissipate their excitement. They would be humiliated and naked and the power of mandatory nakedness was inestimable. Short arm involved having some medical riffraff and a nurse from the infirmary examine their genitals for venereal suppuration. At the announcement there was some hooting and shouting, but not much. Farragut, with his back to Tiny, got out of his pants and put them neatly under the mattress to preserve their press. He also got rid of the copper.

  The doctor, when he was let in, was wearing a full suit and a felt hat. He looked tired and frightened. The nurse was a very ugly man who was called Veronica. He must have been pretty years ago because in a dim, dim light he had the airs and graces of a youth, but in a stronger light he looked like a frog. The ardor that had rucked his face and made it repulsive still seemed to burn. These two sat down at Tiny’s desk and Tiny gave them the records and unlocked the cells. Naked, Farragut could smell himself and he could also smell Tennis, Bumpo and the Cuckold. They had not had a shower since Sunday and the smell was strong and like a butcher’s spoiled trimmings. Bumpo went on first. “Squeeze it,” said the doctor. The doctor’s voice was strained and angry. “Pull back the foreskin and squeeze it. Squeeze it, I said.” The doctor’s suit was cheap and stained, and so were his tie and his vest. Even his eyeglasses were soiled. He wore the felt hat to stress the sovereignty of sartorial rule. He, the civilian judge, was crowned with a hat while the penitents were naked, and with their sins, their genitals, their boast-fulness and their memories exposed they seemed shameful. “Spread your cheeks,” said the doctor. “Wider. Wider. Next—73482.”

  “It’s 73483,” said Tiny.

  “I can’t read your writing,” the doctor said. “73483.”

  73483 was Tennis. Tennis was a sunbather and had a snowy bum. His arms and legs were, for an athlete, very thin. Tennis had clap. It was very still. For this ceremony, the sense of humor that survived even the darkness of the Valley was extinguished. Extinguished too was the convulsive gaiety Farragut had seen at chow.

  “Where did you get it?” the doctor asked. “I want his name and his number.” With a case in hand, the doctor seemed reasonable and at ease. He reset his eyeglasses elegantly with a single finger and then drew his spread fingers across his brow.

  “I don’t know,” said Tennis. “I don’t remember any such thing.”

  “Where did you get it?” the doctor said. “You’d better tell me.”

  “Well, it could have been during the ball game,” said Tennis. “I guess it was during the ball game. Some dude blew me while I was watching the ball game. I don’t know who it was. I mean if I’d known who it was I would have killed him, but I was so interested in the game that I didn’t notice. I love baseball.”

  “You didn’t slip it up somebody’s ass in the shower,” said the doctor.

  “Well, if I did it was by accident,” said Tennis. “It was entirely by accident. We only get showers once a week and for a man, a tennis champion, who takes showers three or four times a day, when you only get into the shower once a week it’s very confusing. You get dizzy. You don’t know what’s going on. Oh, if I knew, sir, I’d tell you. If I’d known what was going on I would have hit him, I would have killed him. That’s the way I am. I’m very high-strung.”

  “He stole my Bible,” Chicken screamed, “he stole my limp leather copy of the Holy Bible. Look, look, the sonofabitch stole my Holy Bible.”

  Chicken was pointing at the Cuckold. The Cuckold was standing with his knees knocked together in a ludicrous parody of feminine shyness. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” he said. “I ain’t stole nothing of his.” He made a broad gesture with his arms to demonstrate his empty-handedness. Chicken pushed him. The Bible fell from between his legs and hit the floor. Chicken grabbed the book. “My Bible, my Holy Bible, it was sent to me by my cousin Henry, the only member of my family I heard from in three years. You stole my Holy Bible. You are so low I wouldn’t want to spit on you.” Then he spat on the Cuckold. “I never heard, I never dreamed of anybody so low that he would steal from a man in prison a Holy Bible given to him by his loving cousin.”

  “I didn’t want your Goddamned Bible and you know it,” roared the Cuckold. He had much more volume to his voice than Chicken and pitched it at a lower register. “You never looked at your Bible. There was about an inch of dust on it. For years I heard you talking about how the last thing in the world you needed was a Bible. For years I’ve been hearing you bad-mouth your cousin Henry for sending you a Bible. Everybody in the block is tired of hearing you talk about Henry and the Bible. All I wanted was the leather to make wrist-watch straps. I wasn’t going to hurt the Bible. I was going to return the Bible to you without the leather was all. If you wanted to read the Bible instead of complaining about how it wasn’t a can of soup, you would have found the Bible just as readable when I returned it.”

  “It stinks,” muttered Chicken. He was holding the Bible to his nose and making loud noises of inhalation. “He stuck my Bible up under his balls. Now it stinks. The Holy Scripture stinks of his balls. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy stink.”

  “Shut up, shut up,” said Tiny. “The next time any of you opens your mouth you get a day’s cell lock.”

  “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 of 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 prayerbooks 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.