Falconer (20 page)

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 unself-consciously, 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 there’s your piano and your grandfather’s crappy library and that five-hundred-pound bust of Homer….”

“I’m leaving,” she sobbed, “I’m leaving.”

“Oh, stop saying that,” Eben shouted. “How can I be expected to take seriously, even in a quarrelsome way, a woman who relishes lying to herself?”

He closed the kitchen door and passed the drinks.

“Why are you so cruel?” Farragut asked.

“I’m not always cruel,” he said.

“I think you are,” said Marcia.

“I’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to build up some understanding,” said Eben. “For example. Carrie wanted a television set for the kitchen and so I bought her an excellent set. The first thing in the morning she would go downstairs and start talking to the television. When she sleeps she wears a kind of hat like a shower cap and she puts a lot of rejuvenating oils on her face. So there she sits in the morning with this hat on, talking a mile a minute to the television set. She contradicts news reports, laughs at the jokes and keeps up a general conversation. When I go to work she doesn’t say goodbye; she’s too busy talking to the television. When I come home in the evening she sometimes says hello, but very seldom. She’s usually too busy chatting with the newsmen to pay any attention to me. Then at half-past six she says, ‘I’m putting your dinner on the table.’ That’s sometimes the only sentence I get out of her during a full day, sometimes a week, sometimes longer. Then she serves the food and takes her plate back to the kitchen and eats her dinner there, talking and laughing at a show called
Trial and Error
. When I go to bed she’s talking to an old movie.

“So let me tell you what I did. I have a friend named Potter. He’s a TV man. We ride into town on the train together sometimes. So I 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 the 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 jail 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 wait 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 hatboxes, 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 close in there, but the smell of his grave was no more than the plain smell of canvas; the smell of some tent.