by John Cheever
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 his 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 F UNDER RED ALERT. CELL BLOCK F 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 smelled worse. So did Bumpo and Tennis. A reproduction of the ditto he had typed was stuck between the bars. LOUISA PIERCE 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.
“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 Mo
nday 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 wall,
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 I’ll 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 shirts, 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.
The irony of Christmas is always upon the poor in heart; the mystery of the solstice is always upon the rest of us. The inspired metaphor of the Prince of Peace and his countless lights, overwhelming the maddening and the threadbare carols, was somewhere here; here, on this asshole August afternoon the legend still had its stamina. Their motives were pure enough. Mrs. Spingarn genuinely loved her son and grieved at his cruel and unnatural end. The guards genuinely feared disorder and death. The inmates would fleetingly feel that they had a foot in the faraway street. Farragut looked above this spectacle to the rest of the classroom. There was an empty blackboard and above this an alphabet written in a Spencerian hand long, long ago. The penmanship was very elegant, with loops, hoops, tails, follow-throughs and a crossed t like an acrobat’s bow. Above this was an American flag with forty-two stars, the white stripes dyed by time to the yellow of hot piss. One would have liked to do better, but that was the color of the flag under which Farragut had marched into battle. Then there was the photographer.
He was a slender man with a small head—a dandy, Farragut thought. His camera, on a tripod, was no bigger than a wrist-watch box, but he seemed to have a relationship with or a noticeable dependence upon the lens. He seemed to take his squinted eye away from it reluctantly. His voice was croupy and elegant. Two photographs were taken. The first was a picture of the form with the prisoner’s number and the designated address. The second was of the prisoner himself, taken with a little gentle guidance. “Smile. Lift your head
a little. Bring your right foot closer to your left. That’s it!” When Chicken took his place and held up his form, they all read: Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus. Icicle Street. The North Pole. The photographer smiled broadly and was looking around the room to share this joke with the rest of them when he suddenly grasped the solemnity of Chicken’s loneliness. No one at all laughed at this hieroglyph of pain, and Chicken, sensing the stillness at this proof of his living death, swung his head around, shot up his skinny chin and said gaily, “My left profile’s my best.”
“That’s it,” said the photographer.
At his turn Farragut wondered what role to aim at, and trying to look and feel like a constant husband, a comprehensive father and a prosperous citizen, smiled broadly and stepped into the intense brightness and heat of the light. “Oh, Indian Hill,” said the photographer. “I know that place. I mean I’ve seen the sign. Do you work there?”
“Yes,” said Farragut.
“I have friends in Southwick,” said the photographer. “That’s it.”
Farragut went to the window, where he had a broad view of cellblocks B and C. They looked, with their ranks of windows, like some obsolete Northern cotton mill. He looked in the windows for flames and a rush of shadows, but all he saw was a man hanging up his wash to dry. The passiveness of the place bewildered him. They could not all have been humiliated and gulled by nakedness and a glittering tree, but that seemed to be the case. The place seemed sleepy. Had they all retreated into the torpor he had chosen when Chicken fired his mattress? He looked again at the stranger hanging out his wash.
