by John Cheever
Farragut joined the others waiting in the corridor. Outside it had begun to rain. Ransome went among them, collecting the forms that had been photographed. These were useless and Farragut watched Ransome with interest, for he was so secretive a man that to follow any of his consecutive movements promised to be revealing. What he did, when he had collected a dozen forms, was to climb onto a chair. Ransome was a big man and the chair was rickety and he checked his safety by shifting his weight. When he felt secure he began to tear the forms into small pieces and cast them, like a sower, over the heads and shoulders of the others. His face was beaming and he sang “Silent Night.” The Cuckold picked up a good bass, and considering the distance they had all come from caroling, they formed a small, strong choir, singing enthusiastically about the Virgin. The old carol and the scraps of paper falling softly through the air onto their heads and shoulders was not at all a bitter recollection on that suffocating rainy day, but a light-hearted memory of some foolishness, linked to a fall of snow,
Then they lined up and marched out. Another group of inmates stood lined up in the tunnel, waiting their turn to be photographed beside the tree. Farragut regarded them with the pleasure and surprise with which one regards the crowd waiting to get into the next show at a movie. That was the end to his cheerfulness. As soon as they saw the faces of the guards in the tunnel they saw that their Christmas was over.
Farragut washed himself carefully and vigorously with cold water and then smelled himself like a canine, sniffed his armpits and his crotch, but he couldn’t tell whether it was he or Bumpo who smelled. Walton was on duty, studying his texts. He was taking a night course in automobile salesmanship. He couldn’t pay too much attention to whether or not they talked. When Ransome asked to play cards with the Stone, he sprang him impatiently. “I’m studying for an exam. I’m studying for an exam. I know that none of youse knows what that means, but if I flunk this exam I got to take the whole year over again. This whole place is gone crazy. I can’t study at home. The baby’s sick and crying all the time. I come here early to study in the squad room, but the squad room is like an insane asylum. Now I come here looking for peace and quiet and it’s like the Tower of Babel. Play cards but shut up.”
Farragut, taking advantage of this, began to shout at Bumpo. “Why the fuck don’t you wash your skin? I’ve washed myself, I’ve washed myself all over, but I can’t enjoy my clean smell because you smell like a waste can in the back alley behind some butcher store.”
“Oh, I do, do I!” yelled Bumpo. “So that’s how you get your rocks off, sniffing cans outside butchers’.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” said Walton. “I got to study for this exam. You know what it’s like, Farragut. If I fail this exam I have to spend another year, another semester anyhow, sitting on my ass on a hard chair studying what I already knew but forgot. And my professor is a bitch. Talk if you have to, but talk softly.”
“Oh, Bumpo, oh, Bumpo, dear Bumpo, darling Bumpo,” said Farragut softly, “what did the cashier say to the cash register?”
“I’m a wrinkled grape,” said Bumpo.
“Oh, darling Bumpo,” said Farragut softly. “I have a great favor to ask of you. The history of modern civilization depends upon your arriving at an intelligent decision. I have heard you speak fluently about your willingness to give your diamond to some starving child or some lonely crone, by-passed by the thoughtless world. Now a much greater opportunity is about to be placed in your hands. I possess the rudiments of a radio—an aerial, a ground and a copper-wire tuner. All I need is an earphone and a diode crystal. The Stone has one and you have the other. With this, with your diamond, the Gordian knot of communications that threatens the Department of Correction and the government itself can be cut. They have twenty-eight hostages by the balls. A single mistake on the part of our brothers will have us cut down by the hundreds. A crucial mistake on the part of the Department of Correction may detonate riots in every prison in this nation and perhaps the world. We are millions, Bumpo, we are millions, and if our riots are triumphant we can rule the world, although you and I, Bumpo, know that we lack the brains for this. So, lacking the brainpower, the best we can hope for is a truce, and it all depends on your rock.”
“Take your little prick and go home,” said Bumpo softly.
“Bumpo, Bumpo, dear Bumpo, God gave you your diamond and God means you should give it to me. It is the balance, Bumpo, upon which the lives of millions depend. The radio was invented by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895. It was the beautiful discovery of that fact that electrified airwaves, containing sound, can, at a distance, be reconverted into intelligible sound. With the help of your diamond, Bumpo, we can learn exactly how much they’re twisting those twenty-eight balls at The Wall.”
“Fifty-six,” said Bumpo.
“Thank you, Bumpo, sweet Bumpo, but if we learn this we will learn how to play our own strategies to our greatest advantage, perhaps even to buy our freedom. With your diamond I can make a radio.”
“If you’re such a great magician, why can’t you get your ass out of here?” said Bumpo.
“I’m talking about airwaves, Bumpo, not flesh and blood. Air. Sweet air. Thin air. Do you hear me? I wouldn’t be able to speak to you softly and with patience at this point if I did not believe that mathematics and geometry are a lying and a faulty analogy for the human disposition. When one finds in men’s nature, as I do in yours, some convexity, it is a mistake to expect a corresponding concavity. There is no such thing as an isosceles man. The only reason I continue to plead with you, Bumpo, is my belief in the inestimable richness of human nature. I want your diamond to save the world.”
Bumpo laughed. His laughter was genuine and boyish and loud and ringing. “You’re the first dude to spring that one on me. That’s a new one. Save manudes—kind. All I said was I was going to save some hungry little kid or some old person. I didn’t say nothing about the world. It’s worth anywhere from nineteen to twenty-six thousand. The diamond’s hard but the market ain’t. They’d have chopped off my finger years ago if the stone wasn’t too big to fence. It’s a big, safe stone. I never had an offer like yours. I had twenty-seven offers, maybe more. I been offered every cock in the place, of course, and every asshole, but I can’t eat cock and I don’t like asshole. I don’t mind a nice hand job, but no hand job is worth twenty-six thousand. Years ago there was a guard, he got fired, who offered me a case of whiskey once a week. All kinds of shit like that. Outside food. Tons of it. Also a lifetime supply of cigarettes for a chain smoker. Lawyers. They stand in line to talk with me. They promise me retrials, guaranteed pardons and dismissals. There was one guard who offered me an escape. I was going to go out on the underchassis of a delivery truck. That’s the only one that really interested me. This truck was coming in on Tuesdays and Thursdays and he knew the driver, the driver was his brother-in-law. So he rigged up this hammock under the chassis, it was just big enough to hold me. He showed me the whole thing and I even practiced getting into it, but he wanted the rock before I got out. Of course I wouldn’t give it to him and the whole thing blew up. But nobody ever told me I could save the world.” He looked at his diamond and turned it, smiling at the fire it contained. “You didn’t know you could save the world, did you?” he asked the diamond.
“Oh, why would anyone want to get out of a nice place like this?” asked Chicken. He struck some chords on his guitar and while he went on talking in his blue-grass voice his song was unaccompanied. “Who would want to riot in order to get out of a nice place like this? In the paper now you read there’s unemployment everywhere. That’s why the lieutenant governor is in here. He can’t get no job outside. Even famous movie stars with formerly millions is standing in line with their coat collars turned up around their necks waiting for a handout, waiting for a bowl of that watery bean soup that don’t keep you from feeling hungry and makes you fart. Out in the street everybody’s poor, everybody’s out of work and it rains all the time. They mug one another for a crust of
bread. You have to stand in line for a week just to be told you ain’t got no job. We stand in line three times a day to get our nice minimal-nutritional hot meal, but out in the street they stand in line for eight hours, twenty-four hours, sometimes they stand in line for a lifetime. Who wants to get out of a nice place like this and stand in line in the rain? And when they ain’t standing in line in the rain they worry about atomic war. Sometimes they do both. I mean they stand in line in the rain and worry about atomic war because if there’s an atomic war they’ll all be killed and find themselves standing in line at the gates of hell. That’s not for us, men. In case of an atomic war we’ll be the first to be saved. They got bomb shelters for us criminals all over the world. They don’t want us loose in the community. I mean they’ll let the community burn before they’ll set us free, and that will be our salvation, friends. They’d rather burn than have us running around the streets, because everybody knows that we eat babies, fuck old women up the ass and burn down hospitals full of helpless cripples. Who would ever want to get out of a nice place like this?”
“Hey, Farragut, come down and play cards with the Stone,” said Ransome. “Let Farragut out, will you, Walton? The Stone wants to play cards with Farragut.”
“I will if you’ll shut up,” said Walton. “I got to pass this exam. You promise to shut up?”
“We promise,” said Ransome.
Farragut’s cell door opened and he went down the block to the Stone’s, carrying his chair. The Stone was smiling like a fool, which he may have been. The Stone handed him the pack of cards and he dealt them out, saying, “One for you and one for me.” Then he fanned out his hand, but that many cards were bulky and a dozen fell to the floor. When he stopped to pick them up he heard a voice, not a whisper but a normal voice, tuned to a minimum volume. It was the Glass Ear—the two-hundred-dollar hearing aid—tuned to a radio frequency. He saw the four batteries in their canvas-covered corset lying on the floor and the plastic, flesh-colored orifice from which he guessed the voice came. He picked up his cards and began to slap them out on a table, saying, “One for you and one for me.” The voice said, “Registration for continuing education classes in conversational Spanish and cabinetmaking will be open from five to nine on Monday through Friday at the Benjamin Franklin High School, situated on the corner of Elm and Chestnut Streets.” Then Farragut heard piano music. It was the dreariest of the Chopin preludes—that prelude they use in murder films before the shot is fired; that prelude that was expected to evoke for men of his day and earlier the image of a little girl with braids, confined for some cruel hour to a bleak room, where she was meant to produce the bleat of impuissant waves and the sad stir of falling leaves. “The latest news from The Wall, or the Amana Prison,” said the voice, “is that negotiations are still proceeding between the administration and the committee of inmates. Forces to secure the institution are available, but reports of impatience among the troops have been denied. Five of the hostages have testified on radio and TV that they have been receiving food, medical supplies and adequate protection under the leadership of the Black Muslim faction. The governor has made it clear for the third time that he does not have the power to grant amnesty. A final petition for the release of the hostages has been presented and the inmates will give their answer at daybreak tomorrow. Daybreak is officially slated for six twenty-eight, but the weather predictions are for cloudy skies and more rain. In the local news, an octogenarian bicyclist named Ralph Waldo won the Golden Age Bicycle Race in the town of Burnt Valley on his eighty-second birthday. His time was one hour and eighteen minutes. Congratulations, Ralph! Mrs. Charles Roundtree of Hunters Bridge in the northeast corner of the state claims to have seen an unidentified flying object at such a close range that the draft raised her skirts while she was hanging out the wash. Stay tuned for details of the five-alarm fire in Tappansville.” Then another voice sang:
Garroway toothpaste cleans your teeth,
Both the dirt above and the dirt beneath,
Garroway toothpaste cavities hate,
Garroway toothpaste is for you and your mate.
Farragut slapped down cards for another ten minutes and then began to shout, “I got a toothache. I want to quit. I got a toothache.”
“Go home, go home,” said Walton. “I got to study.”
Farragut picked up his chair, and stopping by Ransome’s cell, he said, “I got this terrible toothache. It’s a wisdom tooth. I’m forty-eight years old and I still got my wisdom teeth. This one on the left is just like a clock. It starts aching at around nine at night and stops at dawn. Dawn tomorrow is when I’ll know whether the pain is over, whether or not the tooth has to come out. I’ll know at daybreak. That’s about six twenty-eight.”
“Thank you, Miss America,” said Ransome.
Farragut stumbled back to his cell, got into bed and slept.
He had a dream that was unlike the day. His dream was in the most vivid colors, those aniline dyes that the eye receives only after this spectrum has been extracted by a camera. Farragut is on a cruise ship, experiencing a familiar mixture of freedom, boredom and sunburn. He swims in the pool, drinks with the international crowd in the bar at noon, gets laid during the siesta, plays deck tennis, paddle tennis, and is in and out of the pool and back in the bar at four. He is all limber, ballsy and turning a golden hue that will be wasted in the dark bars and clubs where he will lunch on his return. So he is idle and a little uneasy with his idleness when, one afternoon at the end of the siesta, a schooner is seen coming up from the port side. The schooner flies some flags, but he does not understand these. He does notice that the cruiser has reduced her speed. The wave at the bow grows smaller and smaller and then there is none and the schooner sails alongside the towering ship.
The schooner has come for him. He goes below, climbs down a rope ladder onto her deck and as they sail away he waves goodbye to his friends on the cruise—men, women and the members of the ship’s orchestra. He does not know who owns the schooner and who greets him there. He remembers nothing except that he stands on her deck and watches the cruise ship regain speed. She is a big old-fashioned cruiser, named for a queen, white as a bride, with three canted stacks and a little gold lace, like a toy boat, at her bow. She goes crazily off course, veers to port and heads at full tilt for a nearby island that looks like one of the Atlantic islands, only with palms. She rams the beach, heels to starboard and bursts into flame, and while he sails away he can see, over his shoulder, the pyre and the enormous column of smoke. The instant he woke, the brightness of the dream’s colors were quenched by the grayness of Falconer.
Farragut woke. He swung his head from his watch to the window. It was six twenty-eight. Rain was falling into that part of the world and he guessed into The Wall. It was Tiny who had waked him. “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” said Tiny. “Chesterfields, they satisfy. I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” He had five cigarettes in his hand. Farragut took two. They were loosely rolled and were, he guessed, cannabis. He looked lovingly at Tiny, but any fondness or love he felt for the guard fell way short of Tiny’s haggardness. His eyes were red. The lines from his nostrils past his mouth were like the ruts in a dirt road and there was no life or responsiveness left in his countenance. He stumbled down the block, saying, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” The old cigarette mottoes were older than either of them. Everyone but the Stone knew what they had and what to do and Ransome helped the Stone. “Suck on it and hold it in your lungs.” Farragut lighted his first, sucked on the smoke, held it in his lungs and felt the true, the precious amnesty of the drug spread through his frame. “Wow,” he said. “Hot shit,” said Chicken. There was groaning all over the place. Tiny bumped into the cell edge and bumped his arm. “There’s more where that came from,” he said. He fell into his steel chair, buried his head in his arms and began to snore.
The amnesty on which Farragut exhaled formed a cloud—a gray cloud like the clouds that could begin to be seen ou
tside his window—and raised him nicely off his earthbound cot, raised him above all earthly things. The noise of the rain seemed to be a gentleness—something his bellicose mother, pumping gas in her opera cloak, had missed. Then he heard the squeek-geek-growl of the Stone’s glass ear and some sleepy urging from Ransome. “Jiggle it, jiggle it, jiggle it, for Christ’s sake.” Then he heard the voice of a woman, not, he thought in the expansiveness of cannabis, the voice of a young woman or an old one, neither the voice of beauty nor of plainness—the voice of a woman who might sell you a package of cigarettes anywhere in the world.
“Hi, people! This is Patty Smith, anchorwoman for Eliot Hendron, who, as you may not know, has been overwhelmed by the events of the last half hour. The Wall has been repossessed by state troops. The administration petition with a plea for further time was burned by the inmates’ committee at six A.M. The inmates agreed to the plea for further time but to nothing else. There appear to have been preparations for the execution of the hostages. The gas attack began at six-eight, followed two minutes later by the order to fire. Firing lasted six minutes. It is too early to estimate the number of the dead, but Eliot, my partner and the last eyewitness in yard K, estimated them as at least fifty dead and fifty dying. Troopers have stripped the living of their clothes. They now he naked in the rain and the mud, vomiting from the effects of CS-2. Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, excuse me.” She was crying. “I guess I’ll have to join Eliot in the infirmary.”
“Sing us a song, Chicken Number Two,” said Ransome. “Oh, sing us a song.”
There was a wait while Chicken shook off a little of the cannabis, reached for his guitar and struck four strong chords. Then he began to sing. His voice was reedy, sophisticated in its bluegrass flatness, but flat and reedy, it had the coarse grain of bravery. He sang:
