Falconer (3 page)

“It was partly because we stopped doing things together,” he said. “We used to do so much together. We used to sleep together, travel together, ski, skate, sail, go to concerts, we did everything together, we watched the World Series and drank beer together although neither of us likes beer, not in this country. That was the year Lomberg, whatever his name was, missed a no-hitter by half an inning. You cried. I did too. We cried together.”

“You had your fix,” she said. “We couldn’t do that together.”

“But I was clean for six months,” he said. “It didn’t make any difference. Cold turkey. It nearly killed me.”

“Six months is not a lifetime,” she said, “and anyhow, how long ago was that?”

“Your point,” he said.

“How are you now?”

“I’m down from forty milligrams to ten. I get methadone at nine every morning. A pansy deals it out. He wears a hairpiece.”

“Is he on the make?”

“I don’t know. He asked me if I liked opera.”

“You don’t, of course.”

“That’s what I told him.”

“That’s good. I wouldn’t want to be married to a
homosexual, having already married a homicidal drug addict.”

“I did not kill my brother.”

“You struck him with a fire iron. He died.”

“I struck him with a fire iron. He was drunk. He hit his head on the hearth.”

“All penologists say that all convicts claim innocence.”

“Confucius say …”

“You’re so superficial, Farragut. You’ve always been a lightweight.”

“I did not kill my brother.”

“Shall we change the subject?”

“Please.”

“When do you think you’ll be clean?”

“I don’t know. I find it difficult to imagine cleanliness. I can claim to imagine this, but it would be false. It would be as though I had claimed to reinstall myself in some afternoon of my youth.”

“That’s why you’re a lightweight.”

“Yes.”

He did not want a quarrel, not there, not ever again with her. He had observed, in the last year of their marriage, that the lines of a quarrel were as ritualistic as the words and the sacrament of holy matrimony. “I don’t have to listen to your shit anymore,” she had screamed. He was astonished, not at her hysteria, but at the fact that she had taken the words out of his mouth. “You’ve ruined my life, you’ve ruined my life,” she screamed. “There is nothing on earth as cruel as a rotten marriage.” This was all on the tip of his tongue. But then, listening for her to continue to anticipate his
thinking, he heard her voice, deepened and softened with true grief, begin a variation that was not in his power. “You are the biggest mistake I ever made,” she said softly. “I thought that my life was one hundred percent frustration, but when you killed your brother I saw that I had underestimated my problems.”

When she spoke of frustration she sometimes meant the frustration of her career as a painter, which had begun and ended by her winning second prize at an art show in college twenty-five years ago. He had been called a bitch by a woman he deeply loved and he had always kept this possibility in mind. The woman had called him a bitch when they were both jay-naked on the upper floor of a good hotel. She then kissed him and said: “Let’s pour whiskey all over one another and drink it.” They had, and he could not doubt the judgment of such a woman. So bitchily, perhaps, he went over her career as a painter. When they first met she had lived in a studio and occupied herself mostly with painting. When they married, the
Times
had described her as a painter and every apartment and house they lived in had a studio. She painted and painted and painted. When guests came for dinner they were shown her paintings. She had her paintings photographed and sent to galleries. She had exhibited in public parks, streets and flea markets. She had carried her paintings up Fifty-seventh Street, Sixty-third Street, Seventy-second Street, she had applied for grants, awards, admission to subsidized painting colonies, she had painted and painted and painted, but her work had never been received with any enthusiasm at all. He understood, he tried to understand, bitch that he was.
This was her vocation, as powerful, he guessed, as the love of God, and as with some star-crossed priest, her prayers misfired. This had its rueful charms.

Her passion for independence had reached into her manipulation of their joint checking account. The independence of women was nothing at all new to him. His experience was broad, if not exceptional. His great-grandmother had been twice around the Horn, under sail. She was supercargo, of course, the captain’s wife, but this had not protected her from great storms at sea, loneliness, the chance of mutiny and death or worse. His grandmother had wanted to be a fireman. She was pre-Freudian, but not humorless about this. “I love bells,” she said, “ladders, hoses, the thunder and crash of water. Why can’t I volunteer for the fire department?” His mother had been an unsuccessful businesswoman, the manager of tearooms, restaurants, dress shops and at one time the owner of a factory that turned out handbags, painted cigarette boxes and doorstops. Marcia’s thrust for independence was not, he knew, the burden of his company but the burden of history.

He had caught on to the checkbook manipulation almost as soon as it began. She had a little money of her own, but scarcely enough to pay for her clothes. She was dependent upon him and was determined, since she couldn’t correct this situation, to conceal it. She had begun to have tradesmen cash checks and then claim that the money had been spent for the maintenance of the house. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters and painters didn’t quite understand what she was doing, but she was solvent and they didn’t mind
cashing her checks. When Farragut discovered this he knew that her motive was independence. She must have known that he knew. Since they were both knowledgeable, what was the point of bringing it up unless he wanted a shower of tears—which was the last thing he wanted.

“And how,” he asked, “is the house? How is Indian Hill?” He did not use the possessive pronoun—My house, Your house, Our house. It was still his house and would be until she got a divorce. She didn’t reply. She did not draw on her gloves finger by finger, or touch her hair, or resort to any of the soap opera chestnuts used to express contempt. She was sharper than that. “Well,” she said, “it’s nice to have a dry toilet seat.”

He jogged out of the visitors’ room and up the stairs to cellblock F. He hung his white shirt on a hanger and went to the window, where, for the space of about a foot, he could focus on two steps of the entrance and the sidewalk the visitors would take on their way to cars, taxis or the train. He waited for them to emerge like a waiter in an American-plan hotel waiting for the dining room doors to open, like a lover, like a drought-ruined farmer waiting for rain, but without the sense of the universality of waiting.

They appeared—one, three, four, two—twenty-seven in all. It was a weekday. Chicanos, blacks, whites, his upper-class wife with her bell-shaped coif—whatever was fashionable that year. She had been to the hairdresser before she came to prison. Had she said as much? “I’m not going to a party, I’m going to jail to see my husband.” He remembered the women in the sea before Ann Ecbatan’s coming out. They all swam a
breast stroke to keep their hair dry. Now some of the visitors carried paper bags in which they brought home the contraband they had tried to pass on to their loved ones. They were free, free to run, jump, fuck, drink, book a seat on the Tokyo plane. They were free and yet they moved so casually through this precious element that it seemed wasted on them. There was no appreciation of freedom in the way they moved. A man stooped to pull up his socks. A woman rooted through her handbag to make sure she had the keys. A younger woman, glancing at the overcast sky, put up a green umbrella. An old and very ugly woman dried her tears with a scrap of paper. These were their constraints, the signs of their confinement, but there was some naturalness, some unself-consciousness about their imprisonment that he, watching them between bars, cruelly lacked.

This was not pain, nothing so simple and clear as that. All he could identify was some disturbance in his tear ducts, a blind, unthinking wish to cry. Tears were easy; a good ten-minute hand job. He wanted to cry and howl. He was among the living dead. There were no words, no living words, to suit this grief, this cleavage. He was primordial man confronted with romantic love. His eyes began to water as the last of the visitors, the last shoe, disappeared. He sat on his bunk and took in his right hand the most interesting, worldly, responsive and nostalgic object in the cell. “Speed it up,” said Chicken Number Two. “You only got eight minutes to chow.”

Cellblock F was only half tenanted. Most of the toilets and locks on the upper tier were broken and
these were empty. Nothing but the cell locks really worked and the toilet in Farragut’s cell flushed itself noisily and independently. The air of obsolescence—the feeling that these must surely be the last days of incarceration—was strong. Of the twenty men in F, Farragut, at the end of two weeks, fell into a family group that consisted of Chicken Number Two, Bumpo, the Stone, the Cuckold, Ransome and Tennis. This organization was deeply mysterious. Ransome was a very tall and a handsome man who was supposed to have murdered his father. Farragut had quickly learned never to ask a comrade what he was doing in Falconer. It would be a stupid violation of the terms on which they lived with one another, and in any case the truth was not in them. Ransome was laconic. He spoke to almost no one but the Stone, who was helpless. Everyone talked about the Stone. Some criminal organization had pierced his eardrums with an ice pick. They had then framed him, bought him a long sentence and given him a two-hundred-dollar hearing machine. This was a canvas carrier that hung from his shoulders by straps. It contained a plastic flesh-colored receiver, a pipe to his right ear and four batteries. Ransome guided the Stone to and from mess, urged him to wear his hearing appliance and changed his batteries when they faded. He almost never spoke to anyone else.

Tennis had come on hard on Farragut’s second day, early in the morning when they had swept their cells and were waiting for chow. “I’m Lloyd Haversham, Jr.,” he said. “Does that name ring a bell? No? They call me Tennis. I thought you might know because you look like the sort of man who might play tennis. I won the
Spartanburg doubles, twice in a row. I’m the second man in the history of tennis to have done this. I learned on private courts, of course, I’ve never played on a public court. I’m listed in the sports encyclopedia, the dictionary of sports greats, I’m a member of the tennis academy and I was cover story in the March issue of
Racquets. Racquets
is the leading publication of the tennis equipment industry.” While he talked, Tennis displayed all the physical business of a hard sell—hands, shoulders, pelvis, everything was in motion. “I’m in here because of a clerical error, an error in banking. I’m a visitor, a transient, I see the parole board in a few days and I’ll be out then. I deposited thirteen thousand dollars in the Bank for Mutual Savings on the morning of the ninth and wrote three checks for two hundred dollars before the deposit had cleared. By accident I used my roommate’s checkbook—he was runner-up in the Spartanburg doubles and never forgave me for my victory. All a man needs is a little jealousy and a clerical error—bad luck—and they throw him into jail, but I’ll leap the net in a week or two. This is more of a goodbye than a hello but hello anyhow!” Tennis, like most of them, talked in his sleep and Farragut had heard him asking: “Have you been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?” Bumpo explained this to Farragut. Tennis’s athletic career was thirty years in the past and he had been picked up for check forgery when he was working as a delicatessen clerk. Bumpo had this to say about Tennis, but he said nothing about himself, although he was the cellblock celebrity and was supposed to have been the second man to hijack an airplane. He had forced a pilot to fly
from Minneapolis to Cuba and was in on an eighteen-year sentence for kidnapping. Bumpo never mentioned this or anything else about himself excepting a large ring he wore, set with a diamond or a piece of glass. “It’s worth twenty thousand,” he said. The price varied from day to day. “I’d sell it, I’d sell it tomorrow if somebody’d guarantee me it would save a life. I mean if there was some very old and lonely and hungry person whose life I could save, well, then I’d sell it. Of course, I’d have to see the documents. Or if there was some little girl who was defenseless and all alone and I was sure that nobody or nothing else in the world could save her life, well, then I’d give her my stone. But first I’d want to see the documents. I’d want to have affidavits and photographs and birth certificates, but if it could be proven to me that my rock was the only thing that was between her and the grave, well, then she could have it in ten minutes.”

Chicken Number Two talked about his brilliant career as a jewel thief in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and while he talked in his sleep more than the rest of them, there was in his talk a refrain. “Don’t ask her for a lower price,” he would shout. His voice was vehement and irritable. “I told you, don’t ask her for a lower price. She ain’t going to give it to you for a lower price, so don’t ask.” When he talked about his career he did not detail his successes. He spoke mostly about his charm. “The reason I was so great was my charm. I was very charming. Everybody knew I had class. And willingness, I had willingness. I give the impression of a very willing person. Anybody asks me to get anything, I give them the impression that I’ll try. Get me
the Niagara Falls, they say. Get me the Empire State Building. Yes sir, I always say, yes sir, I’ll try. I got class.”

The Cuckold, like Tennis, came on hard. Farragut had not been a member of the family for a week before the Cuckold paid him a call. He was a fat man with a very pink face, thin hair and a galling and exaggerated smile. The most interesting thing about him was that he ran a business. He paid a package of mentholated cigarettes for every two spoons that anyone could lift from the mess hall. In the shop he turned the spoons into bracelets, and Walton, the cell corporal, kited these out in his underwear and fenced them at a gift shop in the nearest city, where they were advertised as having been created by a man who was condemned to death. They sold for twenty-five dollars. With these profits he kept his cell full of canned hams, chickens, sardines, peanut butter, crackers and pasta, which he used as bait to get his comrades to listen to his stories about his wife. “Let me entertain you with a nice slice of ham,” he said to Farragut. “Sit down, sit down, and have a nice slice of ham, but first let me tell you what I’m in here for. I iced my wife by mistake. The night I iced her was the night she told me none of the three kids was mine. Also she told me that the two abortions I paid for and the miscarriage wasn’t mine either. That’s when I iced her. Even when things were going good she couldn’t be trusted. Like there was this week or two when we were just fucking all the time. I was in sales but it was an off-season and we just stayed in the house fucking and eating and drinking. So then she said what we needed was a vacation from fucking one
another and I could see what she meant. I was really in love. She said wouldn’t it be great if we was away for a couple of weeks and how wonderful it would be when we was reunited. Wouldn’t it. So I saw what she meant and I went back on the road for a couple of weeks but one night in South Dakota I got drunk and laid a stranger and I felt very guilty so when I come home and took off my pants I felt I had to confess to her that I had been impure and so I did. So then she kissed me and said it didn’t matter and she was glad I had confessed because she had a confession to make herself. She said that on the day I left she got a cab to go to the other side of town to see her sister and this cabdriver had such sparkly black eyes that they seemed to stick into her and so she scored with the cabdriver when he got off duty at ten. And the next day she went to Melcher’s to buy some cat food and there was a traffic pileup to which she was a witness and when this handsome state trooper was questioning her he asked if he could continue the questioning at home and so she scored with him. So then that night, that very night, an old high school chum showed up and she scored, wet-decks, with him. Then the next morning, the very next morning, when she was getting gas at Harry’s she got the hots for this new gas pumper and he comes over to the house on his lunch hour. So at about that time I got back into my pants and went out of the house and down to the bar on the corner and stayed there for about two hours but at the end of two hours I was back in bed with her.” “You were going to give me a piece of ham,” said Farragut. “Oh, yes,” said the Cuckold. He
was both stingy and greedy, and Farragut got only a thin, small slice of ham. Chicken bargained with the Cuckold and wouldn’t go into his cell until he had been promised a set quantity of food.