Falconer

The city out of the car windows looked much wilder and stranger than beautiful. He imagined the length of time it would take-he saw time as a length of road, something measured by surveyors' instruments-before he could move unselfconsciously. When the car stopped he opened the door. The cardinal was going up the steps of the cathedral and two of the people on the sidewalk knelt. Jody stepped out of the car. There was no strength at all in his legs. Freedom hit him like a gale wind. He fell to his knees and broke the fall with his hands. "Shit, man, you drunk?" the next acolyte asked. "Fortified wine," said Jody. "That wine was fortified." Then his strength returned, all of it, and he got to his feet and followed the others into the cathedral and to a vestry much like any other.

He took off his robe and while the other men put on ties and jackets he tried to invest his white shirt, his issue fatigues and his basketball sneakers with respectability. He did this by bracing his shoulders. He saw himself in a long glass and he saw that he looked emphatically like an escaped convict. There was nothing about him-his haircut, his pallor, his dancy step-that a half-blind drunk wouldn't have put down as a prison freak. "His Eminence would like to speak to you," the monsignor said. "Please follow me."

A door was opened and he went into a room a little like the priest's front parlor at home. The cardinal stood there, now in a dark suit, and held out his right hand. Jody knelt and kissed the ring. "Where are you from?" the cardinal asked. "Saint Anselm's, Your Eminence," said Jody. "There is no Saint Anselm's in the diocese," said the cardinal, "but I know where you're from. I don't know why I asked. Time must play an important part in your plans. I expect you have about fifteen minutes. It is exciting, isn't it? Let's get out of here." They left the parlor and the cathedral. On the sidewalk a woman knelt and the cardinal gave her his ring to kiss. She was, Jody saw, an actress he had seen on television. Another woman knelt and kissed his ring before they reached the end of the block. They crossed the street and a third woman knelt and kissed his ring. For her he wearily made a sign of the crass; and then they went into a store. The acknowledgment of their arrival was a matter of seconds. Someone of authority approached them and asked if the cardinal wanted a private room. "I'm not sure," he said. "I'll leave it up to you. This young man and I have an important appointment in fifteen minutes. He is not wearing the right clothes." "We can manage," the authority said. Jody was measured with a tape. "You're built like a tailor's dummy," said the man. This went to Jody's head, but he definitely felt that vanity was out of place in the miracle. Twenty minutes later he walked up Madison Avenue. His walk was springy-the walk of a man going to first on balls, which can, under some circumstances, seem to be a miracle.

It was an August day; a dog day. Rome and Paris would be empty of everyone but tourists» and even the Pope would be taking it easy in Gandolfo. After the methadone line, Farragut went out to cut the big lawn between the education building and cellblock A. He got the mower and the gas tank out of the garage and joked with the Mad Dog Killer. He started the motor with a rope pull, which brought on memories of outboard motors on mountain lakes in the long ago. That was the summer when he had learned to water-ski, not at the stern of an outboard, but at the stern of a racer called a Gar-Wood. He had Christianized over the high starboard wake-bang-onto a riffled and corrugated stretch of water and then into the dropped curtain of a rain squall. "I have my memories," he said to the lawn mower. "You can’t take my memories away from me." One night he and a man named Tony and two girls and a bottle of Scotch raced eight miles down the lake at lull throttle-you couldn’t have heard thunder-to the excursion boat pier, where there was a big clock face under a sign that said: THE NEXT EXCURSION TO THE NARROWS WILL BE AT…They had come to steal the big clock face. It would look great in somebody’s bedroom along with the YIELD sign and the DEER CROSSING treasure. Tony was at the helm and Farragut was the appointed thief. He vaulted the gunwale and began to pull at the clock face, but it was securely nailed to the pier. Tony passed Farragut a wrench from the toolbox and he smashed the supports with this, but the noise woke some old watchman, who limped after him while he carried the clock face to the Gar-Wood. "Oh, stop," the old man shouted in his old man's voice. "Stop, stop, stop. Why do you have to do this? Why do you have to destroy everything? Why do you have to make life hard for old men like me? What good is it, what good is it to anybody? What are you doing except to disappoint people and make people angry and cost people money? Stop, stop, stop. Just bring it back and I won't say nothing. Stop, stop…" The noise of the motor, when they escaped, overwhelmed the old man's voice, but Farragut would hear it, more resonant than the Scotch and the girl, for the rest of that night and, he guessed, for the rest of his life. He had described this to the three psychiatrists he had employed. "You see, Dr. Gaspoden, when I heard the old man shouting 'Stop, stop,' I understood my father for the first time in my life. When I heard this old man shouting 'Stop, stop,' I heard my father, I knew how my father felt when I borrowed his tails and went in to lead the cotillion. The voice of this old stranger on a summer night made my father clear to me for the first time in my life." He said all this to the lawn mower.

The day was shit. The air was so heavy that he would put visibility at about two hundred yards. Could it be exploited for an escape? He didn't think so. The thought of escape reminded him of Jody, a remembrance that had remained very light-hearted since he and Jody had passionately kissed goodbye. The administration and perhaps the archdiocese had finessed Jody's departure and he was not even a figure in prison mythology. DiMatteo, the chaplain's dude, had given Farragut the facts. They had met in the tunnel on a dark night when Farragut was leaving the Valley. It was no more than six weeks after Jody's flight. DiMatteo showed him a newspaper photograph of Jody that had been sent to him in the mail. It was Jody on his wedding day-Jody at his most beautiful and triumphant. His stunning brightness shone through the letterpress of some small-town newspaper. His bride was a demure and pretty young Oriental and the caption said that H. Keith Morgan had that day married Sally Chou Lai, the youngest daughter of Ling Chou Lai, president of the Viaduct Wire Factory where the groom was employed. There was nothing more and Farragut wanted nothing more. He laughed loudly, but not DiMatteo, who said angrily, "He promised to wait for me. I saved his life and he promised to wait for me. He loved me-oh, God, how he loved me. He gave me his golden cross." DiMatteo lifted the cross out of the curls on his chest and showed it to Farragut. Farragut's knowledge of the cross was intimate-it may have borne his tooth marks-and his memories of his lover were vivid, but not at all sad. "He must have married her for her money," said DiMatteo. "She must be rich. He promised to wait for me."

Farragut's mowing of the lawn was planned. Roughly halfway around the circumference of the lawn he reversed his direction so the grass, as it fell, would not heap, dry and discolor. He had heard or read somewhere that cut grass fertilized living grass, although he had observed that dead grass was singularly inert. He walked barefoot because he got better purchase with the soles of his naked feet than he did in prison-Issue boots. He had knotted the laces of his boots and hung them around his neck so they wouldn't be stolen and cut into wrist-watch straps. The contrite geometry of grass-cutting pleased him. To cut the grass one followed the contour of the land. To study the contour of the land-to read it as one did on skis-was to study and read the contour of the neighborhood, the county, the state, the continent, the planet, and to study and read the contour of the planet was to study and read the nature of its winds as his old father had done, sailing cat boats and kites. Some oneness was involved, some contentment.

When he had finished the big lawn he pushed the mower back to the garage. "They got a riot at The Wall," said the Killer, stooped above a motor and speaking over his shoulder. "It come over the radio. They got twenty-eight hostages, but it's that time of year. Burn your mattress and get your head broken. It's that time of year.

Farragut jogged up to his eel lb lock. There was a pleasant stillness there at that hour. Tiny was watching a game show on TV. Farragut stripped off his clothes and washed the sweat off his body with a rag and cold water. "And now," the TV announcer said, "let's take another look at the prizes. First we have the sterling-silver-plated eight-piece Thomas Jefferson coffee service." This was cut into and while Farragut was drawing on his pants, another announcer-a thick-featured young man with yellow hair-said, solemnly: "Inmates at the upstate prison of Amana, commonly known as The Wall, have rioted and are holding anywhere from twenty-eight to thirty prison officers as hostages, threatening to cut their throats if their demands are not met. Prison Superintendent John Cooper-I’m sorry-Rehabilitation Facility Superintendent Cooper has agreed to meet the inmates in neutral territory and is awaiting the arrival of Fred D. Emison, head of the State Department of Correction. Stay tuned for further news." The show cut back to a display of more prizes.

Farragut looked at Tiny. His face was white. Farragut cased the cellblock. Tennis, Bumpo and the Stone were in. The Stone was unplugged so that meant that three of them knew. Ransome and Chicken Number Two came in and both of them gave him a look. They knew. Farragut tried to guess what would happen. Any sort of congregation would be forbidden, he guessed, but he guessed that at the same time any provocative disciplines would be sidestepped, how would be the first congregation, but when the chow bell rang Tiny opened the cell doors and they headed for the corridor. "Did you hear that on TV?" Tiny asked Farragut. "You mean about the Thomas Jefferson eight-piece sterling-silver-plated coffee service?" asked Farragut. Tiny was sweating. Farragut had gone too far. He was a lightweight. He had blown it. Tiny might have nabbed him then, but he was frightened and Farragut was free to go down to chow, chow was regulation, but Farragut looked into every face he saw to judge whether or not they knew. He put it at twenty percent. The stir in the mess hall was, he thought, immeasurable, and there were several explosions of hysterical gaiety. One man began to laugh and couldn't stop. He was convulsive. They were given very generous servings of pork in a flour sauce and half a canned pear. "ALL INMATES WILL RETURN TO CELLBLOCK AFTER CHOW FOR FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS. ALL INMATES WILL RETURN TO CELLBLOCK AFTER CHOW FOR FURTHER ANNOUNCEMENTS." He would have bet on that. Almost everything counted on the next ten minutes, and in the next ten minutes they got them all, so far as Farragut knew, back into their cells. Clang.

Everybody had radios. When they got back to their cells Chicken turned on some loud dance music and stretched out on his cot, smiling. "Kick it, Chicken," Farragut shouted, hoping that if the radio was still no one would notice it. That was dumb because the problem must have been clear to about everyone. Ten minutes later they got the announcement. "ALL RADIOS ARE TO BE TURNED IN TO THE CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR TUNE-UP AND FREE REPAIR. ALL RADIOS ARE TO BE TURNED IN TO THE CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR TUNE-UP AND FREE REPAIR." Tiny went down the cellblock and collected the radios. There were groans and oaths and the Cuckold tossed his radio through the bars to smash on the floor. "You feeling good today, Bumpo?" Farragut asked. "You feeling good today, you think today is a good day?" "No," said Bumpo, “I never liked this humid weather." He didn't know, then. The phone rang. There was a message for Farragut. He was to get down to the office and cut two dittos. Marshack would wait for him in the squad room.

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 SRINGARN, 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 900/8/27 IN THE ORDER OP RECEIVED APPLICATIONS. WHITE SHIRTS ALLOWABLE DON'T BRING NOTHING BUT A HANDKERCHIEF.

Farragut turned off his light, closed the door and walked down t he 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 plan is 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 smelted the oil. It smelted 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 went 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 boastfulness 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 gel 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 or 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 prayer books 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.

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 h is 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 E UNDER RED ALERT. CELL BLOCK E 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 smelted worse. So did Bumpo and Tennis. A reproduction of the ditto he had typed was stuck between the bars. LOUISA FIERCE 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 Monday 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 wail. 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 m 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 shins, 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.

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 smelted himself like a canine, sniffed his armpits and h is crotch, but he couldn't tell whether it was he or Bumpo who smelted. 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 Ye 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'! 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 mankind. 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 bluegrass 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 inline 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 or 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 gel 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 cabinet making 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'D 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 haggard ness. 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 outside 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 lie 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:

If the only song I can sing is a sad song, I ain't going to sing at all.

If the only song I can sing is a sad song,

I ain't going to sing at all.

I ain't going to sing about the dead and the dying,

I ain't going to sing about the knives and the firing. I ain't going to sing about the praying and the crying- If the only song I can sing is a sad song, I ain't going to sing no more.

So they were naked again or nearly so, wailing in line to get new DC issue, choosing their places in front of signs that said EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL, having stripped themselves of their prison grays and tossed these into a bin. The new issue was a noncommittal green, scarcely, thought Farragut, a verdant green, scarcely the green of Trinity and the long summer months, but a shade up from the gray of the living dead. It was only Farragut who sang a bar of "Greensleeves" and only the Cuckold who smiled. Considering the solemnity of this change of color, skepticism and sarcasm would have seemed to them all trifling and contemptible, for it was for this light-greenness that the men of Amana had died or had lain, vomiting and naked, for hours in the mud. That was a fact. After the revolution, discipline was less rigorous and their mail was not scrutinized, but their labor was still worth half a package of cigarettes a day and this change of uniform was the biggest thing to have been accomplished by the riot at The Wall. None of them would be so stupid as to say "Our brothers died for this," and almost none of them were so stupid as not to guess at the incalculable avarice involved in changing the dress of the prison population at a universal cost and for the profit of a handful of men who could spend a longer time snorkeling in the Lesser Antilles or getting blown on yachts or whatever they liked. There was a marked solemnity to this change of dress.

The change of dress was part of an atmosphere of amnesty that had settled over Falconer after the rebellion at The Wall had been crushed. Marshack had hung up his plants again with the wire that Farragut had stolen and no one had found the honed typewriter key. After new uniforms were issued, alterations were in order. Most of the men wanted their new issue cut and resewn along sharp lines. It was four days before there was any green thread for sale, and the supply ran out in an hour, but Bumpo and Tennis, both of whom could sew, got a spool and a week was spent in fittings and alterations. "Knock, knock," said the Cuckold, and Farragut asked him in although he did not and never had truly wanted to see his mate. He did want to hear a voice other than TV, and to feel in his cell the presence of another man, a companion. The Cuckold was a compromise, but he had no choice. The Cuckold had had his new issue cut so tight that it must be painful. The seat of his pants would bark his asshole like the saddle of a racing bike and the crotch definitely gave him pain, Farragut could see, because he flinched when he sat down. In spite of all this pain, thought Farragut uncharitably, there was nothing appetizing to be seen, but then his thinking about the Cuckold was generally uncharitable. As his mate sat down and prepared to talk again about his wife, Farragut thought that the Cuckold had an inflatable ego. He seemed, preparing to talk, to be in the act of being pumped up with gas. Farragut had the illusion that this increase in size was palpable and that the Cuckold, swelling, would push the copy of Descartes off the table, push the table up against the bars, uproot the toilet and destroy the cot where he lay. His story, Farragut knew, would be unsavory, but what Farragut didn't know was what importance to give unsavory matters. They existed, they were invincible, but the light they threw was, he thought, unequal to their prominence. The Cuckold claimed to have a rich lode of information, but the facts he professed only seemed to reinforce Farragut’s ignorance, suspiciousness and his capacity for despair. These were all parts of his disposition and might, he guessed, need cultivation. Haste and impetuous optimism could be contemptible, and with this in mind he did not protest when the Cuckold cleared his throat and said, "If you was to ask my advice about marriage, I would advise you not to put too much attention on fucking. I guess I married her because she was a great fuck-I mean she was my size, she came at the right time, it was great there for years. But then when she started fucking everybody, I didn't know what to do. I couldn't get any advice from the church and all I could get out of the law was that I should divorce her, but what about the kids? They didn't want me to go, even when they knew what she was doing. She even talked with me about it. When I complained about her screwing everybody, she gave me this lecture about how it wasn't an easy life. She said sucking every cock on the street was a very lonely and dangerous way to live. She told me it took courage. She did, really. She gave me this lecture. She said that in the movies and in the books you read it's a very nice and easy thing, but she'd had to face all sorts of problems. She told me about this time when I was on the road and she went to this bar and restaurant for dinner with some friends. In North Dakota we have these food divorcement laws where you eat in one place and drink in another, and she had moved from the drinking place to the eating place. But at the bar there was this very, very beautiful man. She gave him the horny eye through the doorway and he gave it right back to her. You know what I mean. The horny eye?

"So then she told me that she told her friends, very loudly, that she wasn't going to have any dessert, that she was going to drive home to her empty house and read a book. She said all this so he could hear her and would know that there wasn't going to be any husband or kids around. She knew the bartender and the bartender would give him her address. So she went home and put on a wrapper and then the doorbell rang and there he was. So right in the hallway he began to kiss her and put her hand on his cock and drop his pants, right in the front hallway, and at about this time she discovered that while he was very beautiful, he was also very dirty. She told me that he couldn't have had a bath in a month. As sewn as she got a whiff of him she cooled off and began to figure out how she could get him into a shower. So he went on kissing her and getting out of his clothes and smelling worse and worse and then she suggested that maybe he would like a bath. So then he suddenly got angry and said that he was looking for a cunt, not a mother, that his mother told him when he needed a bath, that he didn't go around looking for sluts in saloons in order to be told when he needed a bath and when to get his hair cut and when to brush his teeth. So he got dressed and went away and she told me this to illustrate how to be a round heels takes all kinds of courage.

"But I did lousy things too. When I came off the road once I said hello and went upstairs to take a crap and while I was sitting there I noticed that there was this big pile of hunting and fishing magazines beside the toilet. So then I finished and pulled up my pants and came out shouting about this constipated fisherman she was fucking. I yelled and yelled. I said it was just her speed to pick up with a boob who couldn't cast a fly or take a shit. I said I could imagine him sitting there, his face all red, reading about catching the gamy muskallonge in stormy northern waters. I said that was just what she deserved, that just by looking at her I could tell it was her destiny to get reamed by one of those pimply gas pumpers who do their fishing in magazines and can't cut a turd. So she cried and cried and about an hour later I remembered that I had subscribed to all these hunting and fishing magazines and when I said that I was sorry she really didn't care and I felt shitty." Farragut said nothing-he seldom said anything to the Cuckold- and the Cuckold went back to his cell and turned up his radio.

Ransome came down with the flux one Tuesday morning and by Wednesday afternoon everyone but the Stone had it. Chicken claimed that it came from the pork they had been eating all week. He claimed that a fly had flown out of his meat. He claimed to have captured the fly and offered to show it to anyone who asked, but no one asked. They all put in for sick call, but Walton or Goldfarb announced that the infirmary was overworked and that no doctor's or nurse's appointment could be made for ten days. Farragut had the flux and a fever and so did everyone else. On Thursday morning they were issued, in their cells, a large dose of paregoric, which granted them an hour's amnesty from Falconer but seemed powerless before the flux. On Friday afternoon there was this announcement over the PA. "A PREVENTIVE VACCINE FOR THE SPREAD OF INFLUENZA THAT HAS REACHED EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS IN SOME CITIES OF THE NORTHEAST WILL BE ADMINISTERED TO REHABILITATION FACILITY INMATES FROM THE HOURS OF NINE HUNDRED TO EIGHTEEN HUNDRED. WAIT FOR YOUR CELL CALL. THE INOCULATION IS MANDATORY AND NO SUPERSTITIOUS OR RELICIOUS SCRUPLES WILL BE RESPECTED."

"They're trying to use us as guinea pigs," said Chicken. "We're being used as guinea pigs. I know all about it. There was a man in here who had laryngitis. They had this new medicine for him, this needle, they gave it to him two, three days and they couldn't get him out of here up to the infirmary before he was dead. Then they had this guy with clap, a light case of clap, and they gave him inoculations and his balls swole up, they swole up as big as basketballs, they swole and swole so he couldn't walk and they had to take him out of here on a board with these big globes sticking up in the sheet. And then there was this guy whose bones were leaking, the marrow was leaking out of his bones which made him very weak, and so they give him these shots, these experimental shots, and he turned to stone, he turned to stone, didn't he, Tiny? Tiny, tell that's true about the fellow whose bones leaked and who turned to stone."

"Tiny ain't here," said Walton. "Tiny don't come in until Saturday."

"Well, Tiny will tell you when he comes in. He turned to stone. He was just like cement-stone. Tiny carved his initials on his ass. He turned into rock right before our eyes. And the crazies. If they think you're crazy they give you this green shot-yellowish-green, it is-and if it don't work it makes you so crazy you wouldn't believe it. Like there was this guy claimed he could play the national anthem on his toenails-all day long he did this-and then they gave him this experimental shot. Well, first he tore off part of one of his ears-I forget which side-and then stuck his fingers into his eyes and blinded himself. Tiny, isn't that true, Isn't that true, Tiny, about the yellowish-green stuff they give the crazies?”

"Tiny ain't here," said Walton. "He don't come in until Saturday and I got no patience with any of you. I got a wife and a baby at home and they need this vaccine but I can't get none for them. You get medicine that millionaires can't buy and all you do is complain."

"Oh, what the hell," said Chicken. "I'll take anything they give me it's free, but I ain't no guinea pig."

They got their vaccine on Saturday afternoon-not at the infirmary but in the supply room from the windows marked EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL. Fifteen or twenty men from that lot whose religious beliefs forbade them to take medicine were corralled by the used-clothes bin and Farragut asked himself if he possessed any religious beliefs for which he would endure solitary. There was his spiritual and his chemical dependence upon drugs, for which he would likely have killed a man. He realized then and only then that he had been given no methadone during the three days of the revolution and the three days of the plague. He did not understand at all. One of the orderlies giving the shots was the man who had given him methadone. When Farragut rolled up his sleeve and presented h is arm for the needle, he asked, "Why haven't I been getting my methadone? It's against the law. It says right in my sentence that I'm entitled to methadone." "You're a dumb sonofabitch," said the orderly kindly. "Some of us have been wondering when you'd notice. You've been on placebos for nearly a month. You're clean, my friend, you're clean." He gave Farragut the needle and he shook a little at this extraneous and unnatural pain and imagined the vaccine coursing through his blood. "It can't be true," said Farragut, "it can't be true." "Count the days," said the orderly, "just count the days. Move along." Farragut was stunned. He went over to the door, where Chicken was waiting. Farragut's singular smallness of mind was illustrated by the fact that he resented that the Department of Correction had been successful where the three blue-ribbon drug cures he had taken had failed. The Department of Correction could not be right. He could not congratulate himself on having mastered his addiction, since he had not been aware of it. Then an image of his family, his hated origins, loomed up in his mind. Had that antic cast-that old man in his catboat, that woman pumping gas in her opera cloak, his pious brother- had they conveyed to him some pure, crude and lasting sense of perseverance? "I made a big decision," said Chicken, hooking his arm in Farragut's. "I made a very big decision. I'm going to sell my gitfiddle." Farragut felt only the insignificance of Chicken's decision in the light of what he had just been told; that, and the fact that Chicken's hold on his arm seemed desperate. Chicken seemed truly feeble and old. Farragut could not tell him that he was clean. "Why are you selling your gitfiddle, Chicken?" he asked. "Why are you going to do a thing like that?" "Three guesses," said Chicken. Farragut had to put an arm around him to get him up the slope of the tunnel and into the block.

It was very quiet. Farragut’s fever reminded him of the bliss of drugs, something he seemed to have forsworn. He was torpid. Then a strange thing happened. He saw, at the open door of his cell, a young man with summery hair and immaculate clericals, holding a little tray with a silver chalice and ciborium. "I've come to celebrate the Holy Eucharist," he said. Farragut got out of bed. The stranger came into the cell. He had a very cleanly smell, Farragut noticed as he approached him and asked, "Shall I kneel?" "Yes, please," said the priest. Farragut knelt on the worn concrete, that surface of some old highway. The thought that these might be intended for his last rites did not disconcert him. There was nothing on his mind at all and he entered, completely, into the verbal pavane he had been taught as a youth. "Holy, Holy, Holy." he said in a loud and manly voice. "Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory. Praise be to Thee, O Lord most high." When he had been blessed with the peace that passes all understanding, he said, "Thank you, Father," and the priest said, "God bless you, my son." But when the youth had left his cell and the block, Farragut began to shout, "Now, who in hell was that, Walton? Who in hell was that?"

"It was some do-gooder," said Walton. "I have to study."

"But how did he get in? I didn't ask for a priest. He didn't do his thing for anybody else. Why did he pick on me?"

"This place is going to hell," said Walton. "No wonder they got riots. They let anybody in. Salesmen. Encyclopedias. Frying pans. Vacuum cleaners."

"I'll write the governor," said Farragut. "If we can't get out, why can everybody get in here? They take your picture, they give you the Holy Eucharist, they ask your mother's maiden name."

He woke late that night. The toilet woke him. He didn't check the time. Naked, he went to his window. Bright lights burned on the drive. A station wagon with its motor running was parked in front of the main entrance. A ski rack was lashed to the roof. Then he saw two men and a woman come down the stairs. All three wore tennis sneakers. They carried an old-fashioned wooden coffin with a cross painted on its top. It was built to fit some rudimentary concept of a Byzantine male, with broad, sloping shoulders and a slender base. Whatever it contained weighed almost nothing. Lightly they lifted it onto the ski rack, secured it there and drove away. Farragut returned to bed and slept.

On Sunday afternoon when he came on duty Tiny brought Farragut halt a dozen tomatoes and asked him to take Chicken into his cell. The old man needed care. Tiny explained that the infirmary was full of beds, they had put beds in the waiting room, the administration office and the corridors, but there was still no room. Farragut ate his tomatoes and agreed. Farragut made his bed in the upper bunk and Tiny got sheets and a blanket and made a bed for Chicken. When Tiny brought Chicken down the corridor he seemed half asleep and he was very smelly. “I'll wash him before I put him in clean sheets," said Farragut. "It's up to you," said Tiny. "Fm going to wash you," he said to Chicken. "You don't have to do this," said Chicken, "but I couldn't walk Co the shower." "I know, I know." He drew a basin of water, got a cloth and removed the invalid shift Chicken was wearing.

The famous tattooing, on which he had squandered the fortune he had made as a brilliant second-story worker, began very neatly at his neck, like a well-cut sweater. All the colors had fled and even the blue of the primary design had gone to gray. What a gaudy sight he must have been! His chest and his upper abdomen were occupied by the portrait of a horse named Lucky Bess. On his left arm there was a sword, a shield, a serpent and the legend "Death Before Dishonor." Below this was "Mother," wreathed in flowers. On his right arm was a lewd dancer, who could probably buck when he flexed his biceps. She stood above the heads of a crowd that covered his forearm. Most of his back was a broad mountainous landscape with a rising sun, and below this, forming an arch above his buttocks, Farragut read, in faded and clumsy Gothic lettering: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." Serpents sprang from his groin and wound down both his legs, with his toes for fangs. All the rest of him was dense foliage. "Why did you sell your gitfiddle, Chicken?" he asked. "For two cartons of menthos," said Chicken. "But why-why?" "Curiosity killed the cat," said Chicken. "Why did you kill your brother, Zeke?"

The accident or what they called the murder had taken place, Farragut thought, because of the fact that whenever he remembered or dreamed about his family he always saw them from the back. They were always stamping indignantly out of concert halls, theaters, sports arenas and restaurants, and he, as the youngest, was always in the rear. "If Koussevitzky thinks I’ll listen to that…" "That umpire is crooked." "This play is degenerate." "I don't like the way that waiter looked at me." "That clerk was impudent." And so on. They saw almost nothing to its completion, and that's the way he remembered them, heading, for some reason in wet raincoats, for the exit. It had occurred to him that they may have suffered terribly from claustrophobia and disguised this weakness as moral indignation.

They were also very bountiful, especially the ladies. They were always raising money to buy skinny chickens for people who lived in tenements or organizing private schools that often went bankrupt. Farragut supposed they did some good, but he had always found their magnanimity painfully embarrassing and he knew for a fact that some of the people who lived in tenements had no use for their skinny chickens. Farragut's only brother, Eben, possessed both of the family traits. He found most waiters, barmen and clerks impertinent, and to meet him for lunch in a restaurant almost always meant a scene. Eben didn't distribute chickens, but he had informed Farragut that on Saturday morning he read to the blind at the Twin Brooks Nursing Home. On this Saturday Farragut and Marcia drove out to the country where Eben and Charrie lived. It had been more than a year since the brothers had met. Farragut thought his brother heavy and even gross. The lives of his two children were tragic and Farragut resented the fact that Eben claimed these tragedies to be merely the nature of life. When they arrived Eben was about to leave for the nursing home and Farragut went along with his only brother.

The Twin Brooks Nursing Home was a complex of one-story buildings with such a commanding view of some river and some mountains that Farragut wondered if this vastness would console or embitter the dying. The heat when they stepped into the place was suffocating, and as Farragut followed his brother down the hall he noticed how heavily perfumed was the overheated air. One after another he smelled, with his long nose, imitations of the thrilling fragrances of spring and verdancy. Pine drifted out of the toilets. The parlors smelled of roses, wisteria, carnations and lemons. But all this was so blatantly artificial that one could imagine the bottles and cans in which the scents were stored, standing on shelves in some closet.

The dying-and that's what they were-were emaciated.

"Your group is waiting in the Garden Room," a male nurse told Eben. His black hair was gleaming, his face was sallow and he gave Farragut the eye like the hustler he was. The room they entered was labeled the Garden Room presumably because the furniture was iron and painted green and reminiscent of gardens. The wall was papered with a garden landscape. There were eight patients. They were mostly in wheelchairs. One of them maneuvered on a walker. One of them was not only blind, but her legs had been amputated at the thigh. Another blind woman was very heavily rouged. Her cheeks were blazing. Farragut had seen this in old women before and he wondered if it was an eccentricity of age- although she couldn't have seen what she was doing.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," said Eben. "This is my brother Zeke. We will continue to read Romola by George Eliot. Chapter Five. 'The Via de' Bardi, a street noted in the history of Florence, lies in Oltrarno, or that portion of the city which clothes the southern bank of the river. It extends from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza de' Mozzi at the head of the Ponte alle Grazie; its right-hand line of houses and walls being backed by the rather steep ascent which in the fifteenth century was known as the hill of Bogoli, the famous stone-quarry whence the city got its pavement-of dangerously unstable consistence when penetrated by rains…”

The blind were very inattentive. The rouged woman fell asleep and snored lightly, but she snored. The amputee wheeled herself out of the room after a page or two. Eben went on reading to the near-dead, the truncated, the blind and the dying. Considering Farragut's passion for blue sky, he thought his brother contemptible; although they looked enough like one another to be taken for twins. Farragut did not like to look at his brother and he kept his eyes on the floor. Eben read to the end of the chapter and as they were leaving Farragut asked him why he had chosen Romola.

"It was their choice," said Eben.

"But the red one fell asleep," said Farragut.

"They often do," he said. "One doesn't, this late in life, blame them for anything. One doesn't take offense."

On the drive home Farragut sat as far from his brother as possible. Marcia opened the door. "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Eben," she said, "but your wife is very upset. We were talking about the family and something she remembered or something I said made her cry."

"She cries all the time," said Eben. "Don't pay any attention to her. She cries at parades, rock music; last year she cried through the whole World Series. Don't take it seriously, don't blame yourself. Do sit down and let me get you a drink."

Marcia's face was pale. She saw the tragic household, Farragut knew, much more clearly than he. Eben was working at that time as a paid executive for some charitable foundation that carried on the tradition of distributing skinny chickens. His marriage could be dismissed, if one were that superficial, as an extraordinary sentimental and erotic collision. There were the lives of the two children to be considered, and their lives seemed ruined by the reverberations of this matrimonial crash. The young man, Eben's only son, was serving a two-year sentence in the Cincinnati workhouse for his part in some peace demonstration against some war. Rachel, the daughter, had tried three times to kill herself. Farragut had exorcised the details, but they would be remembered by Marcia. Rachel had first gone into the attic with a quart of vodka, twenty Seconals and one of those dry-cleaner's bags that threaten suffocation. She had been rescued by the barking of a dog. She had then thrown herself into a barbecue pit after a large party in New Mexico and had been rescued again-disfigured, but rescued. She had then, a month later, blown off a piece of her face with a sixteen-gauge shotgun, using a number nine shell. Rescued again, she had written two high-spirited and passionate letters to her uncle about her determination to die. These had inspired in Farragut a love for the blessed paradigm, the beauty of the establishment, the glory of organized society. Rachel was an aberration and Farragut would sweep her under the rug as her father seemed to have done. Eben's house, the cradle of these tragedies, was distinguished by its traditional composure.

The house was very old and so was most of the furniture. Eben had, quite unselfconsciously, reconstructed the environment of what he claimed was his miserable youth. The blue china had been brought from Canton in a sailing ship by their great-grandfather and they had learned to crawl on the hieroglyphs woven into the Turkey rugs. Marcia and Zeke sat down and Eben went into the pantry to make some drinks. His wife, Carrie, was in the kitchen, sitting on a stool and crying.

"I'm leaving," she sobbed, "I'm leaving. I don't have to listen to your shit anymore."

"Oh, shut up," Eben shouted. "Shut up. Shut up. You've been leaving me weekly or oftener for as long as I can remember. You started leaving me before you asked me to marry you. My God! Unless you rent space in a warehouse, there Isn't a place in the county with enough room for your clothes. You're about as portable as the Metropolitan Opera Company's production of Turandot. Just to get your crap out of here would keep the moving men busy for weeks. You have hundreds of dresses, hats, fur coats and shoes. I have to hang my clothes in the laundry. And then asked him if it was hard to get on Trial and Error and he said no, he thought he could arrange it. So he called me a few days later and said he thought they could use me on Trial and Error the next day. It's a live show and I was to get to the studio at five for makeup and so forth. It's one of those shows where you pay forfeits and what you had to do that night was to walk over a water tank on a tightrope. They gave me a suit of clothes because I'd get wet and I had to sign all sorts of releases. So I got into this suit and went through the first part of the show, smiling all the time at the cameras. I mean I was smiling at Carrie. I thought that for once she might be looking at my smile. Then I climbed up the ladder to the tightrope and started walking over the pool and fell in. The audience didn't laugh too uproariously so they taped in a lot of laughter. So then I got dressed and came home and shouted, 'Hey, hey, did you see me on television?” She was lying on a sofa in the living room by the big set. She was crying. So then I thought I'd done the wrong thing, that she was crying because I looked like such a fool, falling into the tank. She went on crying and sobbing and I said, 'What's the matter, dear?' and she said, 'They shot the mother polar bear, they shot the mother polar bear!' Wrong show. I got the wrong show, but you can't say that I didn't try."

When he got up to collect their glasses he moved the curtain at t he window where he sat and Farragut saw that behind the curtain were two empty vodka bottles. That might account for his stolid, seafaring walk, his thick speech and his air of stupid composure. So with his wife sobbing in the kitchen and his poor daughter crazy and his son in jail, Farragut asked, "Eben, why do you live like this?"

"Because I love it," said Eben. Then he bent down, raised the old Turkey carpet and kissed it with his wet mouth.

"I know one thing," shouted Farragut. "I don't want to be your brother. I don't want anyone on the street, anywhere in the world, to say that I look like you. I'll be any kind of a freak or addict before I'll be mistaken for you. I'll do anything before I'll kiss a rug.

"Kiss my ass," said Eben.

"You’ve got Dad's great sense of humor," Farragut said.

"He wanted you to be killed," screamed Eben. "I bet you didn't know that. He loved me, but he wanted you to be killed. Mother told me. He had an abortionist come out to the house. Your own father wanted you to be killed."

Then Farragut struck his brother with a fire iron. The widow testified that Farragut had struck his brother eighteen to twenty times, but she was a liar, and Farragut thought the doctor who corroborated this lie contemptible.

The trial that followed was, he thought, a mediocre display of a decadent judiciary. He was convicted as a drug addict and a sexual adventurer and sentenced to fail for the murder of his brother. "Your sentence would be lighter were you a less fortunate man," said the judge, "but society has lavished and wasted her riches upon you and utterly failed to provoke in you that conscience that is the stamp of an educated and civilized human being and a useful member of society." Marcia had said nothing in his defense, although she had smiled at him when she was on the stand, smiled at him sadly while she agreed to their description of the grueling humiliation of being married to a drug addict who put the procurement of his fix miles ahead of his love for his wife and his only son. There were the stalenesses of the courthouse to remember, the classroom window shades, the sense of an acute tedium that was like the manipulations of the most pitiless and accomplished torturer, and if the last he would see of the world was the courthouse, he claimed he had no regrets, although he would, in fact, have clung to any floorboard, spittoon or worn bench if he thought that it might save him.

"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.

He was outside the gate or anyhow near the gate. The watchtowers were unarmed at that hour, but there was the moon to worry about. His life hung on the light of the moon and a secondhand car. The distributor would fail, the carburetor would flood, and they would go off together looking for tools while Farragut escaped. Then he heard another voice: "You want a beer?" "You got one?" asked the carrier unenthusiastically, and Farragut heard them walk away.

By bracing his shoulders and his arms, he checked the stress points in his shroud. The warp of the canvas was reinforced with rubber. The neck or crown of the shroud was heavy wire. He got the razor blade out of his pocket and began to cut, parallel to the zipper. The blade penetrated the canvas, but slowly. He needed time, but he would not pray for time or pray for anything else. He would settle for the stamina of love, a presence he felt like the beginnings of some stair. The blade fell from his fingers onto his shirt and in a terrified and convulsive and clumsy lurch he let the blade slip into the sack. Then, groping for it wildly, he cut his fingers, his trousers and his thigh. Stroking his thigh, he could feel the wetness of the blood, but this seemed to have happened to someone else. With the wet blade between his fingers, he went on cutting away at his bonds. Once his knees were free he raised them, ducked his head and shoulders from under the crown and stepped out of his grave.

Clouds hid the light of the moon. In the windows of a watch house he could see two men. One of them drank from a can. Near where he had lain was a pile of stones, and trying to judge what his weight would be in stones, he put a man's weight into the shroud so that they would feed stones in the fire. He walked quite simply out of the gates into a nearby street that was narrow and where most of the people would be poor and where most of the houses were dark.

He put one foot in front of the other. That was about it. The streets were brightly lighted, for this was at that time in our history when you could read the small print in a prayer book in any street where the poor lived. This scrupulous light was meant to rout rapists, muggers and men who would strangle old women of eighty-two. The strong light and the black shadow he threw did not alarm him, nor was he alarmed by the thought of pursuit and capture, but what did frighten him was the possibility that some hysteria of his brain might cripple his legs. He put one foot in front of the other. His foot was wet with blood, but he didn't care. He admired the uniform darkness of the houses. No lights burned at all-no lights of sickness, worry or love-not even those dim lights that burn for the sake of children or their sensible fears of the dark. Then he heard a piano. It could not, that late at night, have been a child, but the fingers seemed stiff and ungainly and so he guessed it was someone old. The music was some beginner's piece-some simple minuet or dirge read off a soiled, dog-eared piece of sheet music-but the player was someone who could read music in the dark since the house where the music came from was dark.

The wall of buildings gave way to two empty lots where the houses had been razed and seized upon as a dump in spite of the NO DUMPING and FOR SALE signs. He saw a three-legged washing machine and the husk of a car. His response to this was deep and intuitive, as if the dump were some reminder of his haunted country. He deeply inhaled the air of the dump although it was no more than the bitterness of an extinguished fire. Had he raised his head, he would have seen a good deal of velocity and confusion as the clouds hurried past the face of a nearly full moon, so chaotically and so swiftly that they might have reminded him, with his turn of mind, not of fleeing hordes but of advancing ranks and throngs, an army more swift than bellicose, a tardy regiment. But he saw nothing of what was going on in heaven because his fear of falling kept his eyes on the sidewalk, and anyhow there was nothing to be seen there that would be of any use.

Then way ahead of him and on the right he saw a rectangle of pure white light and he knew he had the strength to reach this though the blood in his boot now made a noise. It was a laundromat. Three men and two women of various ages and colors were waiting for their wash. The doors to most of the machines hung open like the doors to ovens. Opposite were the bull's-eye windows of drying machines and in two he could see clothes tossed and falling, always falling-falling heedlessly, it seemed, like falling souls or angels if their fall had ever been heedless. He stood at the window, this escaped and bloody convict, watching these strangers wait for their clothes to be clean. One of the women noticed him and came to the window to see him better, but his appearance didn't alarm her at all, he was pleased to see, and when she had made sure that he was not a friend, she turned to walk back to her machine. At a distant corner under a.street light he saw another man. This could be an agent from the Department of Correction, he guessed, or given his luck so far, an agent from heaven. Above the stranger was a sign that said: BUS STOP. NO PARKING. The stranger smelted of whiskey and at his feet was a suitcase draped with clothes on hangers, an electric heater with a golden bowl shaped like the sun and a sky-blue motorcycle helmet. The stranger was utterly inconsequential, beginning with his lanky hair, his piecemeal face, his spare, piecemeal frame and his highly fermented breath. "Hi," he said. "What you see here is a man who is been evicted. This ain't everything I own in the world. I'm making my third trip. I'm moving in with my sister until I find another place. You can't find nothing this late at night. I ain't been evicted because of nonpayment of rent. Money I got. Money's one thing I don't have to worry about. I got plenty of money. I been evicted because I'm a human being, that's why. I make noises like a human being, I close doors, I cough sometimes in the night, I have friends in now and then, sometimes I sing, sometimes I whistle, sometimes I do yoga, and because I'm human and make a little noise, a little human noise going up and down the stairs, I'm being evicted. I'm a disturber of the peace."

"That's terrible," said Farragut.

"You hit the nail on the head," said the stranger, "you hit the nail on the head. My landlady is one of those smelly old widows- they're widows even when they got a husband drinking beer in the kitchen-one of those smelly old widows who can't stand life in any form, fashion or flavor. I'm being evicted because I'm alive and healthy. This ain't all I own, by a long shot. I took my TV over on the first trip. I got a beauty. It's four years old, color, but when I had a little snow and asked the repairman to come in, he told me never, never turn this set in for a new one. They don't make them like this anymore, he said. I le got rid o: the snow and all he charged me was two dollars. He said it was a pleasure to work on a set like mine. It's over to my sister's now. Christ, I hate my sister and she hates my guts, but I'll spend the night there and find a beautiful place in the morning. They have some beautiful places on the south side, places with views of the river. You wouldn't want to share a place with me, would you, if I found something beautiful?"

"Maybe," said Farragut.

"Well, here's my card. Call me if you feel like it. I like your looks. I can tell you got a nice sense of humor. I'm in from ten to four. I sometimes come in a little later, but I don't go out for lunch. Don't call me at my sister's. She hates my guts. Here's our bus."

The brightly lighted bus had the same kind and number of people-for all he knew, the same people-that he had seen in the laundromat. Farragut picked up the heater and the motorcycle helmet and the stranger went ahead of him with his suitcase and his clothes. "Be my guest," he said over his shoulder, paying Farragut's fare. He took the third seat on the left, by the window, and said to Farragut, "Sit here, sit down here." Farragut did. "You meet all kinds, don't you?" he went on. "Imagine calling me a disorderly person just because I sing and whistle and make a little noise going up and down the stairs at night. Imagine. Hey, it's raining," he exclaimed, pointing to the white streaks on the window. "Hey, it's raining and you ain't got no coat. But I got a coat here, I got a coat here I think'll fit you. Wait a minute." He pulled a coat out of the clothes. "Here, try this on."

"You'll need your coat," Farragut said.

"No, no, try it on. I got three raincoats. Moving around from place to place all the time, I don't lose stuff, I accumulate stuff, like I already got a raincoat at my sister's and a raincoat in the lost and found room at the Exeter House and this one I got on. And this one. That makes four. Try it on."

Farragut put his arms into the sleeves and settled the coal around his shoulders. "Perfect, perfect," exclaimed the stranger. "It's a perfect fit. You know, you look like a million dollars in that coat. You look like you just deposited a million dollars in the bank and was walking out of the bank, very slowly, you know, like you was going to meet some broad in a very expensive restaurant and buy her lunch. It's a perfect fit."

"Thank you very much," said Farragut. He stood and shook the stranger's hand. "I'm getting off at the next stop."

"Well, that's all right," said the stranger. "You got my telephone number. I'm in from ten to four, maybe a little later. I don't go out for lunch, but don't call meat my sister's."

Farragut walked to the front of the bus and got oil at the next stop. Stepping from the bus onto the street, he saw that he had lost his fear of falling and all other fears of that nature. He held his head high, his back straight, and walked along nicely. Rejoice, he thought, rejoice.