1So they were naked again or nearly so, waiting in line to get new DC issue, choosing their places in front of signs that said EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL, having stripped themselves of their prison grays and tossed these into a bin. The new issue was a noncommittal green, scarcely, thought Farragut, a verdant green, scarcely the green of Trinity and the long summer months, but a shade up from the gray of the living dead. It was only Farragut who sang a bar of “Greensleeves” and only the Cuckold who smiled. Considering the solemnity of this change of color, skepticism and sarcasm would have seemed to them all trifling and contemptible, for it was for this light-greenness that the men of Amana had died or had lain, vomiting and naked, for hours in the mud. That was a fact. After the revolution, discipline was less rigorous and their mail was not scrutinized, but their labor was still worth half a package of cigarettes a day and this change of uniform was the biggest thing to have been accomplished by the riot at The Wall. None of them would be so stupid as to say “Our brothers died for this,” and almost none of them were so stupid as not to guess at the incalculable avarice involved in changing the dress of the prison population at a universal cost and for the profit of a handful of men who could spend a longer time snorkeling in the Lesser Antilles or getting blown on yachts or whatever they liked. There was a marked solemnity to this change of dress. The change of dress was part of an atmosphere of amnesty that had settled over Falconer after the rebellion at The Wall had been crushed. Marshack had hung up his plants again with the wire that Farragut had stolen and no one had found the honed typewriter key. After new uniforms were issued, alterations were in order. Most of the men wanted their new issue cut and resewn along sharp lines. It was four days before there was any green thread for sale, and the supply ran out in an hour, but Bumpo and Tennis, both of whom could sew, got a spool and a week was spent in fittings and alterations. “Knock, knock,” said the Cuckold, and Farragut asked him in although he did not and never had truly wanted to see his mate. He did want to hear a voice other than TV, and to feel in his cell the presence of another man, a companion. The Cuckold was a compromise, but he had no choice. The Cuckold had had his new issue cut so tight that it must be painful. The seat of his pants would bark his asshole like the saddle of a racing bike and the crotch definitely gave him pain, Farragut could see, because he flinched when he sat down. In spite of all this pain, thought Farragut uncharitably, there was nothing appetizing to be seen, but then his thinking about the Cuckold was generally uncharitable. As his mate sat down and prepared to talk again about his wife, Farragut thought that the Cuckold had an inflatable ego. He seemed, preparing to talk, to be in the act of being pumped up with gas. Farragut had the illusion that this increase in size was palpable and that the Cuckold, swelling, would push the copy of Descartes off the table, push the table up against the bars, uproot the toilet and destroy the cot where he lay. His story, Farragut knew, would be unsavory, but what Farragut didn’t know was what importance to give unsavory matters. They existed, they were invincible, but the light they threw was, he thought, unequal to their prominence. The Cuckold claimed to have a rich lode of information, but the facts he possessed only seemed to reinforce Farragut’s ignorance, suspiciousness and his capacity for despair. These were all parts of his disposition and might, he guessed, need cultivation. Haste and impetuous optimism could be contemptible, and with this in mind he did not protest when the Cuckold cleared his throat and said, “If you was to ask my advice about marriage, I would advise you not to put too much attention on fucking. I guess I married her because she was a great fuck—I mean she was my size, she came at the right time, it was great there for years. But then when she started fucking everybody, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get any advice from the church and all I could get out of the law was that I should divorce her, but what about the kids? They didn’t want me to go, even when they knew what she was doing. She even talked with me about it. When I complained about her screwing everybody, she gave me this lecture about how it wasn’t an easy life. She said sucking every cock on the street was a very lonely and dangerous way to live. She told me it took courage. She did, really. She gave me this lecture. She said that in the movies and in the books you read it’s a very nice and easy thing, but she’d had to face all sorts of problems. She told me about this time when I was on the road and she went to this bar and restaurant for dinner with some friends. In North Dakota we have these food divorcement laws where you eat in one place and drink in another, and she had moved from the drinking place to the eating place. But at the bar there was this very, very beautiful man. She gave him the horny eye through the doorway and he gave it right back to her. You know what I mean. The horny eye?

2“So then she told me that she told her friends, very loudly, that she wasn’t going to have any dessert, that she was going to drive home to her empty house and read a book. She said all this so he could hear her and would know that there wasn’t going to be any husband or kids around. She knew the bartender and the bartender would give him her address. So she went home and put on a wrapper and then the doorbell rang and there he was. So right in the hallway he began to kiss her and put her hand on his cock and drop his pants, right in the front hallway, and at about this time she discovered that while he was very beautiful, he was also very dirty. She told me that he couldn’t have had a bath in a month. As soon as she got a whiff of him she cooled off and began to figure out how she could get him into a shower. So he went on kissing her and getting out of his clothes and smelling worse and worse and then she suggested that maybe he would like a bath. So then he suddenly got angry and said that he was looking for a cunt, not a mother, that his mother told him when he needed a bath, that he didn’t go around looking for sluts in saloons in order to be told when he needed a bath and when to get his hair cut and when to brush his teeth. So he got dressed and went away and she told me this to illustrate how to be a round heels takes all kinds of courage.

3“But I did lousy things too. When I came off the road once I said hello and went upstairs to take a crap and while I was sitting there I noticed that there was this big pile of hunting and fishing magazines beside the toilet. So then I finished and pulled up my pants and came out shouting about this constipated fisherman she was fucking. I yelled and yelled. I said it was just her speed to pick up with a boob who couldn’t cast a fly or take a shit. I said I could imagine him sitting there, his face all red, reading about catching the gamy muskallonge in stormy northern waters. I said that was just what she deserved, that just by looking at her I could tell it was her destiny to get reamed by one of those pimply gas pumpers who do their fishing in magazines and can’t cut a turd. So she cried and cried and about an hour later I remembered that I had subscribed to all these hunting and fishing magazines and when I said that I was sorry she really didn’t care and I felt shitty.” Farragut said nothing—he seldom said anything to the Cuckold— and the Cuckold went back to his cell and turned up his radio. Ransome came down with the flux one Tuesday morning and by Wednesday afternoon everyone but the Stone had it. Chicken claimed that it came from the pork they had been eating all week. He claimed that a fly had flown out of his meat. He claimed to have captured the fly and offered to show it to anyone who asked, but no one asked. They all put in for sick call, but Walton or Goldfarb announced that the infirmary was overworked and that no doctor’s or nurse’s appointment could be made for ten days. Farragut had the flux and a fever and so did everyone else. On Thursday morning they were issued, in their cells, a large dose of paregoric, which granted them an hour’s amnesty from Falconer but seemed powerless before the flux. On Friday afternoon there was this announcement over the PA. “A PREVENTIVE VACCINE FOR THE SPREAD OF INFLUENZA THAT HAS REACHED EPIDEMIC PROPORTIONS IN SOME CITIES OF THE NORTHEAST WILL BE ADMINISTERED TO REHABILITATION FACILITY INMATES FROM THE HOURS OF NINE HUNDRED TO EIGHTEEN HUNDRED. WAIT FOR YOUR CELL CALL. THE INOCULATION IS MANDATORY AND NO SUPERSTITIOUS OR RELIGIOUS SCRUPLES WILL BE RESPECTED.”

4“They’re trying to use us as guinea pigs,” said Chicken. “We’re being used as guinea pigs. I know all about it. There was a man in here who had laryngitis. They had this new medicine for him, this needle, they gave it to him two, three days and they couldn’t get him out of here up to the infirmary before he was dead. Then they had this guy with clap, a light case of clap, and they gave him inoculations and his balls swole up, they swole up as big as basketballs, they swole and swole so he couldn’t walk and they had to take him out of here on a board with these big globes sticking up in the sheet. And then there was this guy whose bones were leaking, the marrow was leaking out of his bones which made him very weak, and so they give him these shots, these experimental shots, and he turned to stone, he turned to stone, didn’t he, Tiny? Tiny, tell that’s true about the fellow whose bones leaked and who turned to stone.”

5“Tiny ain’t here,” said Walton. “Tiny don’t come in until Saturday.”

6“Well, Tiny will tell you when he comes in. He turned to stone. He was just like cement—stone. Tiny carved his initials on his ass. He turned into rock right before our eyes. And the crazies. If they think you’re crazy they give you this green shot—yellowish-green, it is—and if it don’t work it makes you so crazy you wouldn’t believe it. Like there was this guy claimed he could play the national anthem on his toenails—all day long he did this—and then they gave him this experimental shot. Well, first he tore off part of one of his ears—I forget which side—and then stuck his fingers into his eyes and blinded himself. Tiny, isn’t that true, isn’t that true, Tiny, about the yellowish-green stuff they give the crazies?”

7“Tiny ain’t here,” said Walton. “He don’t come in until Saturday and I got no patience with any of you. I got a wife and a baby at home and they need this vaccine but I can’t get none for them. You get medicine that millionaires can’t buy and all you do is complain.”

8“Oh, what the hell,” said Chicken. “I’ll take anything they give me it’s free, but I ain’t no guinea pig.”

9They got their vaccine on Saturday afternoon—not at the infirmary but in the supply room from the windows marked EXTRA LARGE, LARGE, MEDIUM and SMALL. Fifteen or twenty men from that lot whose religious beliefs forbade them to take medicine were corralled by the used-clothes bin and Farragut asked himself if he possessed any religious beliefs for which he would endure solitary. There was his spiritual and his chemical dependence upon drugs, for which he would likely have killed a man. He realized then and only then that he had been given no methadone during the three days of the revolution and the three days of the plague. He did not understand at all. One of the orderlies giving the shots was the man who had given him methadone. When Farragut rolled up his sleeve and presented his arm for the needle, he asked, “Why haven’t I been getting my methadone? It’s against the law. It says right in my sentence that I’m entitled to methadone.” “You’re a dumb sonofabitch,” said the orderly kindly. “Some of us have been wondering when you’d notice. You’ve been on placebos for nearly a month. You’re clean, my friend, you’re clean.” He gave Farragut the needle and he shook a little at this extraneous and unnatural pain and imagined the vaccine coursing through his blood. “It can’t be true,” said Farragut, “it can’t be true.” “Count the days,” said the orderly, “just count the days. Move along.” Farragut was stunned. He went over to the door, where Chicken was waiting. Farragut’s singular smallness of mind was illustrated by the fact that he resented that the Department of Correction had been successful where the three blue-ribbon drug cures he had taken had failed. The Department of Correction could not be right. He could not congratulate himself on having mastered his addiction, since he had not been aware of it. Then an image of his family, his hated origins, loomed up in his mind. Had that antic cast—that old man in his catboat, that woman pumping gas in her opera cloak, his pious brother— had they conveyed to him some pure, crude and lasting sense of perseverance? “I made a big decision,” said Chicken, hooking his arm in Farragut’s. “I made a very big decision. I’m going to sell my gitfiddle.” Farragut felt only the insignificance of Chicken’s decision in the light of what he had just been told; that, and the fact that Chicken’s hold on his arm seemed desperate. Chicken seemed truly feeble and old. Farragut could not tell him that he was clean. “Why are you selling your gitfiddle, Chicken?” he asked. “Why are you going to do a thing like that?” “Three guesses,” said Chicken. Farragut had to put an arm around him to get him up the slope of the tunnel and into the block.

10It was very quiet. Farragut’s fever reminded him of the bliss of drugs, something he seemed to have forsworn. He was torpid. Then a strange thing happened. He saw, at the open door of his cell, a young man with summery hair and immaculate clericals, holding a little tray with a silver chalice and ciborium. “I’ve come to celebrate the Holy Eucharist,” he said. Farragut got out of bed. The stranger came into the cell. He had a very cleanly smell, Farragut noticed as he approached him and asked, “Shall I kneel?” “Yes, please,” said the priest. Farragut knelt on the worn concrete, that surface of some old highway. The thought that these might be intended for his last rites did not disconcert him. There was nothing on his mind at all and he entered, completely, into the verbal pavane he had been taught as a youth. “Holy, Holy, Holy,” he said in a loud and manly voice. “Heaven and earth are full of Thy Glory. Praise be to Thee, O Lord most high.” When he had been blessed with the peace that passes all understanding, he said, “Thank you, Father,” and the priest said, “God bless you, my son.” But when the youth had left his cell and the block, Farragut began to shout, “Now, who in hell was that, Walton? Who in hell was that?”

11“It was some do-gooder,” said Walton. “I have to study.”

12“But how did he get in? I didn’t ask for a priest. He didn’t do his thing for anybody else. Why did he pick on me?”

13“This place is going to hell,” said Walton. “No wonder they got riots. They let anybody in. Salesmen. Encyclopedias. Frying pans. Vacuum cleaners.”

14“I’ll write the governor,” said Farragut. “If we can’t get out, why can everybody get in here? They take your picture, they give you the Holy Eucharist, they ask your mother’s maiden name.”

15He woke late that night. The toilet woke him. He didn’t check the time. Naked, he went to his window. Bright lights burned on the drive. A station wagon with its motor running was parked in front of the main entrance. A ski rack was lashed to the roof. Then he saw two men and a woman come down the stairs. All three wore tennis sneakers. They carried an old-fashioned wooden coffin with a cross painted on its top. It was built to fit some rudimentary concept of a Byzantine male, with broad, sloping shoulders and a slender base. Whatever it contained weighed almost nothing. Lightly they lifted it onto the ski rack, secured it there and drove away. Farragut returned to bed and slept.

16On Sunday afternoon when he came on duty Tiny brought Farragut half a dozen tomatoes and asked him to take Chicken into his cell. The old man needed care. Tiny explained that the infirmary was full of beds, they had put beds in the waiting room, the administration office and the corridors, but there was still no room. Farragut ate his tomatoes and agreed. Farragut made his bed in the upper bunk and Tiny got sheets and a blanket and made a bed for Chicken. When Tiny brought Chicken down the corridor he seemed half asleep and he was very smelly. “I’ll wash him before I put him in clean sheets,” said Farragut. “It’s up to you,” said Tiny. “I’m going to wash you,” he said to Chicken. “You don’t have to do this,” said Chicken, “but I couldn’t walk to the shower.” “I know, I know.” He drew a basin of water, got a cloth and removed the invalid shift Chicken was wearing.

17The famous tattooing, on which he had squandered the fortune he had made as a brilliant second-story worker, began very neatly at his neck, like a well-cut sweater. All the colors had fled and even the blue of the primary design had gone to gray. What a gaudy sight he must have been! His chest and his upper abdomen were occupied by the portrait of a horse named Lucky Bess. On his left arm there was a sword, a shield, a serpent and the legend “Death Before Dishonor.” Below this was “Mother,” wreathed in flowers. On his right arm was a lewd dancer, who could probably buck when he flexed his biceps. She stood above the heads of a crowd that covered his forearm. Most of his back was a broad mountainous landscape with a rising sun, and below this, forming an arch above his buttocks, Farragut read, in faded and clumsy Gothic lettering: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Serpents sprang from his groin and wound down both his legs, with his toes for fangs. All the rest of him was dense foliage. “Why did you sell your gitfiddle, Chicken?” he asked. “For two cartons of menthos,” said Chicken. “But why—why?” “Curiosity killed the cat,” said Chicken. “Why did you kill your brother, Zeke?”

18The accident or what they called the murder had taken place, Farragut thought, because of the fact that whenever he remembered or dreamed about his family he always saw them from the back. They were always stamping indignantly out of concert halls, theaters, sports arenas and restaurants, and he, as the youngest, was always in the rear. “If Koussevitzky thinks I’ll listen to that…” “That umpire is crooked.” “This play is degenerate.” “I don’t like the way that waiter looked at me.” “That clerk was impudent.” And so on. They saw almost nothing to its completion, and that’s the way he remembered them, heading, for some reason in wet raincoats, for the exit. It had occurred to him that they may have suffered terribly from claustrophobia and disguised this weakness as moral indignation.

19They were also very bountiful, especially the ladies. They were always raising money to buy skinny chickens for people who lived in tenements or organizing private schools that often went bankrupt. Farragut supposed they did some good, but he had always found their magnanimity painfully embarrassing and he knew for a fact that some of the people who lived in tenements had no use for their skinny chickens. Farragut’s only brother, Eben, possessed both of the family traits. He found most waiters, barmen and clerks impertinent, and to meet him for lunch in a restaurant almost always meant a scene. Eben didn’t distribute chickens, but he had informed Farragut that on Saturday morning he read to the blind at the Twin Brooks Nursing Home. On this Saturday Farragut and Marcia drove out to the country where Eben and Carrie lived. It had been more than a year since the brothers had met. Farragut thought his brother heavy and even gross. The lives of his two children were tragic and Farragut resented the fact that Eben claimed these tragedies to be merely the nature of life. When they arrived Eben was about to leave for the nursing home and Farragut went along with his only brother. The Twin Brooks Nursing Home was a complex of one-story buildings with such a commanding view of some river and some mountains that Farragut wondered if this vastness would console or embitter the dying. The heat when they stepped into the place was suffocating, and as Farragut followed his brother down the hall he noticed how heavily perfumed was the overheated air. One after another he smelled, with his long nose, imitations of the thrilling fragrances of spring and verdancy. Pine drifted out of the toilets. The parlors smelled of roses, wisteria, carnations and lemons. But all this was so blatantly artificial that one could imagine the bottles and cans in which the scents were stored, standing on shelves in some closet.

20The dying—and that’s what they were—were emaciated.

21“Your group is waiting in the Garden Room,” a male nurse told Eben. His black hair was gleaming, his face was sallow and he gave Farragut the eye like the hustler he was. The room they entered was labeled the Garden Room presumably because the furniture was iron and painted green and reminiscent of gardens. The wall was papered with a garden landscape. There were eight patients. They were mostly in wheelchairs. One of them maneuvered on a walker. One of them was not only blind, but her legs had been amputated at the thigh. Another blind woman was very heavily rouged. Her cheeks were blazing. Farragut had seen this in old women before and he wondered if it was an eccentricity of age— although she couldn’t have seen what she was doing.

22“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” said Eben. “This is my brother Zeke. We will continue to read Romola by George Eliot. Chapter Five. ‘The Via de’ Bardi, a street noted in the history of Florence, lies in Oltrarno, or that portion of the city which clothes the southern bank of the river. It extends from the Ponte Vecchio to the Piazza de’ Mozzi at the head of the Ponte alle Grazie; its right-hand line of houses and walls being backed by the rather steep ascent which in the fifteenth century was known as the hill of Bogoli, the famous stone-quarry whence the city got its pavement —of dangerously unstable consistence when penetrated by rains…’ ”

23The blind were very inattentive. The rouged woman fell asleep and snored lightly, but she snored. The amputee wheeled herself out of the room after a page or two. Eben went on reading to the near-dead, the truncated, the blind and the dying. Considering Farragut’s passion for blue sky, he thought his brother contemptible; although they looked enough like one another to be taken for twins. Farragut did not like to look at his brother and he kept his eyes on the floor. Eben read to the end of the chapter and as they were leaving Farragut asked him why he had chosen Romola.

24“It was their choice,” said Eben.

25“But the red one fell asleep,” said Farragut.

26“They often do,” he said. “One doesn’t, this late in life, blame them for anything. One doesn’t take offense.”

27On the drive home Farragut sat as far from his brother as possible. Marcia opened the door. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Eben,” she said, “but your wife is very upset. We were talking about the family and something she remembered or something I said made her cry.” “She cries all the time,” said Eben. “Don’t pay any attention to her. She cries at parades, rock music; last year she cried through the whole World Series. Don’t take it seriously, don’t blame yourself. Do sit down and let me get you a drink.”

28Marcia’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.

29“I’m leaving,” she sobbed, “I’m leaving. I don’t have to listen to your shit anymore.”

30“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….”

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

32“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?”

33He closed the kitchen door and passed the drinks.

34“Why are you so cruel?” Farragut asked.

35“I’m not always cruel,” he said.

36“I think you are,” said Marcia.

37“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.

38“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.”

39When 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?”

40“Because I love it,” said Eben. Then he bent down, raised the old Turkey carpet and kissed it with his wet mouth.

41“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.”

42“Kiss my ass,” said Eben.

43“You’ve got Dad’s great sense of humor,” Farragut said.

44“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.”

45Then 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.

46The 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.

47“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.

48Farragut 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.”

49There 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.

50When 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.

51Farragut 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.

52The 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.