Falconer (14 page)

I
t 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 Christianiaed 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 full 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 catboats 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 cellblock. 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 side-stepped. Chow 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.”