Falconer (21 page)

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 felt 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 close 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 fucking 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 to 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 to 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 prayerbook 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 smelled 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. He got rid of 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 coat 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 me at my sister’s.”

Farragut walked to the front of the bus and got off 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.

John Cheever was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1912, and went to school at Thayer Academy in South Braintree. He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel,
The Wapshot Chronicle,
won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1978 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death in 1982 he was awarded the National Medal for Literature.