1It 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.

2The 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.”

3Farragut 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.

4Farragut 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.

5Everybody 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.

6The 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.

7“What is this, Sergeant?” Farragut asked. “What is this thing about a Christmas tree?”

8“I don’t know, I don’t know,” said Marshack. “She’s a fucking dogooder, I guess. They cause all the trouble. Efficiency is all that matters and when you don’t get efficiency you get shit.”

9“I know,” said Farragut, “but what’s this all about a Christmas tree?”

10“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.”

11“When did she make this arrangement?”

12“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.

13“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.”

14“Why did you take this job?”

15“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.”

16He closed the glass door. The radio was dead. Farragut typed: 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 MAILED AT NO COST TO THE INMATE’S LOVED ONES. PICTURE-TAKING WILL BEGIN AT 900/8/27 IN THE ORDER OF RECEIVED APPLICATIONS. WHITE SHIRTS ALLOWABLE. DON’T BRING NOTHING BUT A HANDKERCHIEF.

17Farragut turned off his light, closed the door and walked down the 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 plants 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 smelled the oil. It smelled 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.

18Farragut 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.

19“734–508–32 reporting in,” he said to Tiny.

20“What’s the news?”

21“Beginning tomorrow at nine hundred any asshole who wants to be photographed in full color standing beside a Christmas tree has got his wish.”

22“No shit,” said Tiny.

23“I’m not shitting you,” said Farragut. “You’ll get the announcement in the morning.”

24Farragut, 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.”

25Short 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.

26The 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.”

27“It’s 73483,” said Tiny.

28“I can’t read your writing,” the doctor said. “73483.”

2973483 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.

30“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.

31“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.”

32“You didn’t slip it up somebody’s ass in the shower,” said the doctor.

33“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 get 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.”

34Chicken 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.”

35“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.”

36“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.”

37“Shut up, shut up,” said Tiny. “The next time any of you opens your mouth you get a day’s cell lock.”

38“But,” said Chicken.

39“There’s one,” said Tiny.

40“Religious hypocrite,” said the Cuckold.

41“Two,” said Tiny wearily.

42Chicken 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.”

43It 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.

44The light in the prison, that late in the day, reminded Farragut of 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 prayerbooks 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 his 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 F UNDER RED ALERT. CELL BLOCK F 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.”

45They 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.”

46In 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.

47When 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 smelled worse. So did Bumpo and Tennis. A reproduction of the ditto he had typed was stuck between the bars. LOUISA PIERCE 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.

48“I don’t know.”

49“I count on you, said the cashier to the cash register.”

50Farragut 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.

51“You’re a great cash register,” said Bumpo clearly. “Why did the raisin look sad?”

52“Because he’s a dried prune?” asked Farragut.

53“No. Because he’s a worried grape,” said Bumpo.

54“No talking,” said Goldfarb.

55Then 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.

56Tiny 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.

57“I want to play cards with the Stone,” said Ransome. “I want to play cards with the Stone.”

58“He don’t know how to play cards,” said Tiny.

59“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.

60Then Chicken began to strike his guitar and sing:

61There is twenty-eight bottles

62Hanging on the wall,

63And if one of them bottles

64Started to fall,

65They’d be twenty-seven bottles

66Hanging on the wall,

67And if one of them bottles

68Started to fall—

69Tiny blew. “You want Chisholm in here with that bone-breaking hose crew?”

70“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—”

71“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.”

72“That was ten years ago.”

73“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.”

74“They got soft-drink machines.”

75“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.”

76“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.”

77Chicken 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 I’ll 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.

78The 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 shirts, 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.