Falconer

by John Cheever

  “And I remember some mountainous place in the winter on the eve of a holiday where thousands of people had gathered to ski and where thousands more were expected on the late planes and trains. And I remember ski places, those overheated rooms and the books that people leave behind them and the galvanic excitement of physicalness. We were in bed then, when there was, around midnight, a sudden rise in temperature. The thawing snow on the roof made a dripping sound—a water torture for the innkeeper and killjoy music for everyone else. So in the morning it was very warm by whatever standards or measures used in whatever country it was. The snow was sticky enough for snowballs and I formed one and fired it at a tree, hitting or missing I don’t remember, but beyond the snowball we saw the warm blue sky and the snow melting everywhere. But it would be colder on the mountains whose white slopes and summits surrounded us. We took the funicular up, but even on the summit the snow was warm, the day was disastrous, spiritually, financially, we were the prisoners of our environment although if we had enough money we could have flown to some other, colder part of the world. Even on the summit of the mountain the snow was sticky, the day was like spring, and I skied half-naked, but the wet trails were perilous, swift in the shade, retarded in the sun, and in lower altitudes there was an inch of water in every declivity. Then at about eleven the wind changed and I had to get back into my underwear, my shirt, whatever else I had, and just as suddenly the trails turned to ice and one by one the rangers put up the CLOSED signs in seven languages at the beginnings of the trails and there was first the rumor and then the fact that the Italian prime minister had been killed taking a last run down the Glokenschuss. Then no one was coming up the lift, there was a line waiting to descend, and while the lower trails were still not frozen and were negotiable that day, that holiday, that climax of the year was ruined. But then, exactly as the sun reached the zenith, snow began to fall. It was a very heavy and beautiful snow that, like some juxtaposition of gravity, seemed to set the mountain range free of the planet. We drank some coffee or schnapps in a hut—waited twenty minutes or half an hour—and then there was perfect cover on the lower trails and after an hour there was perfect cover everywhere, perhaps four inches that fanned like spume when we turned, a gift, an epiphany, an unaccountable improvement on our mastery of those snow-buried slopes and falls. Then we went up and down, up and down, our strength inexhaustible, our turns snug and accomplished. The clinicians would say that we were skiing down every slope of our lives back to the instant of our birth; and men of good will and common sense would claim that we were skiing in every possible direction toward some understanding of the triumph of our beginnings and our ends. So when you ski you walk on beaches, you swim, you sail, you carry the groceries up the steps to a lighted house, you drop your pants on a large anatomical incongruity, you kiss a rose. We skied that day—those slopes were unlighted—until the valley telephoned the summit to close the lifts and then, reestablishing our terrestrial equilibrium as one does after a long sail, a hockey game—as tightrope artists must—we swaggered into the bar, where our cups and everything else were brimming. I can remember this and I can remember the sailboat race too, but it is getting dark here now, it is too dark for me to write anymore.”

  Farragut was still limping, but his hair had begun to grow back, when he was asked to cut a ditto sheet for an announcement that read: THE FIDUCIARY UNIVERSITY OF BANKING WILL OFFER A COURSE IN THE ESSENCE OF BANKING FOR ANY QUALIFIED INMATE. SEE YOUR CELLBLOCK OFFICER FOR FURTHER INFORMATION. That night Farragut asked Tiny about the news. Tiny told him that the class was going to be limited to thirty-six. Classes would be on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Anyone could apply, but the class would be chosen on the strength of an intelligence quotient test furnished by the university. That’s all Tiny knew. Toledo mimeographed the announcement and they were stuck into the cells along with the evening mail. Toledo should have mimeographed two thousand, but he seemed to have run off another two thousand because the fliers were all over the place. Farragut couldn’t figure out where they came from, but when a wind sprang up in the yard you could see the Fiduciary University announcements circling on the air, not by the tens but by the hundreds. A few days after the announcements were circulated, Farragut had to ditto an announcement for the bulletin board. ANY MAN FOUND USING FIDUCIARY UNIVERSITY ANNOUNCEMENT FOR TOILET PAPER WILL BE GIVEN THREE DAYS CELL LOCK. THEY CLOG THE PLUMBING. Paper was always in short supply and this snow of fliers was a bounty. They were used for handkerchiefs, airplanes and scrap paper. The jailhouse lawyers used them for drafting petitions to the Pope, the President, the governor, the Congress and the Legal Aid Society. They were used for poems, prayers and illustrated solicitations. The greenhouse crew picked them up with nailed sticks, but for some time the flow of fliers seemed mysterious and inexhaustible.

  This was in the autumn, and mixed with the Fiduciary University announcements were the autumn leaves. The three swamp maples within the wall had turned red and dropped their leaves early in the fall, but there were many trees beyond the wall and among the Fiduciary announcements Farragut saw the leaves of beech trees, oaks, tulips, ash, walnut and many varieties of maple. The leaves had the power to remind Farragut, an hour or so after methadone, of the enormous and absurd pleasure he had, as a free man, taken in his environment. He liked to walk on the earth, swim in the oceans, climb the mountains and, in the autumn, watch the leaves fall. The simple phenomenon of light—brightness angling across the air—struck him as a transcendent piece of good news. He thought it fortunate that as the leaves fell, they turned and spun, presenting an illusion of facets to the light. He could remember a trustees meeting in the city over a matter of several million dollars. The meeting was on the lower floor of a new office building. Some ginkgo trees had been planted in the street. The meeting was in October when the ginkgos turn a strikingly pure and uniform yellow, and during the meeting he had, while watching these leaves fall across the air, found his vitality and his intelligence suddenly stimulated and had been able to make a substantial contribution to the meeting founded foursquare on the brightness of leaves.

  Above the leaves and the fliers and the walls were the birds. Farragut was a little wary about the birds since the legend of cruelly confined men loving the birds of the air had never moved him. He tried to bring a practical and informed tone to his interest in birds, but he had very little information. He became interested in a flock of red-winged blackbirds. They lived in swamps, he knew, so there must have been a swamp near Falconer. They fed at dusk in some stagnant water other than the swamp where they lived. Night after night, all through the summer and deep into the fall, Farragut stood at his window and watched the black birds cross the blue sky above the walls. There would be one or two in the beginning, and while they must have been leaders, there was nothing adventurous about their flight. They all had the choppy flight of caged birds. After the leaders came a flock of two or three hundred, all of them flying clumsily but given by their numbers a sense of power—the magnetic stamina of the planet—drawn through the air like embers on a strong draft. After the first flock there were more laggards, more adventurers, and then another flock of hundreds or thousands and then a third. They made their trip back to their home in the swamp after dark and Farragut could not see this. He stood at the window waiting to hear the sound of their passage, but it never happened. So in the autumn he watched the birds, the leaves and the Fiduciary University announcements moving as the air moved, like dust, like pollen, like ashes, like any sign of the invincible potency of nature.

  Only five men in cellblock F applied for the course in banking. Nobody much took it seriously. They guessed that the Fiduciary University was either newborn or on the skids and had resorted to Falconer for publicity. The bounteous education of unfortunate convicts was always good for some space in the paper. When the time came, Farragut and the others went down to the parole board room to take the intelligence quotient test. Farragut knew that he tested badly. He had never tested over 119 and had once
gone as low as 101. In the army this had kept him from any position of command and had saved his life. He took the test with twenty-four other men, counting blocks and racking his memory for the hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle. The scores were supposed to be secret, but for a package of cigarettes Tiny told him he had flunked out with 112. Jody scored at 140 and claimed he had never done so badly.

  Jody was Farragut’s best friend. They had met in the shower, where Farragut had noticed a slight young man with black hair smiling at him. He wore around his neck a simple and elegant gold cross. They were not allowed to speak in the shower, but the stranger, soaping his left shoulder, spread out his palm so that Farragut could read there, written in indelible ink: “Meet me later.” When they had dressed they met at the door. “You the professor?” the stranger asked. “I’m 734–508–32,” said Farragut. He was that green. “Well, I’m Jody,” said the stranger brightly, “and I know you’re Farragut but so long as you ain’t homosexual I don’t care what your name is. Come on with me. I’ll show you my hideout.” Farragut followed him across the grounds to an abandoned water tower. They climbed up a rusty ladder to a wooden catwalk where there was a mattress, a butt can and some old magazines. “Everybody’s got to have a hideout,” said Jody. “This is mine. The view is what they call the Millionaire’s View. Next to the death house, this is the best place for seeing it.” Farragut saw, over the roofs of the old cellblocks and the walls, a two-mile stretch of river with cliffs and mountains on the western shore. He had seen or glimpsed the view before at the foot of the prison street, but this was the most commanding sight he had been given of the world beyond the wall and he was deeply moved.

  “Sit down, sit down,” his friend said, “sit down and I’ll tell you about my past. I ain’t like most of the dudes, who won’t tell you nothing. Everybody knows that Freddy, the Mad Dog Killer, iced six men, but you ask him, he’ll tell you he’s in for stealing flowers from some park. He ain’t kidding. He means it. He really believes it. But when I have a buddy I tell him everything if he wants to hear it. I talk a lot, but I listen a lot too. I’m a very good listener. But my past is really my past. I don’t have no future at all. I don’t see the parole board for twelve years. What I do around here don’t matter much, but I like to stay out of the hole. I know there ain’t no medical evidence for brain damage, but after you hit yourself about fourteen times you get silly. Once I banged myself seven times. There wasn’t nothing more to come out, but I went on banging myself. I couldn’t stop. I was going crazy. That ain’t healthy. Anyhow, I was indicted on fifty-three counts. I had a forty-five-thousand-dollar house in Leavittown, a great wife and two great sons: Michael and Dale. But I was in this bind. People with your kind of life style don’t ever understand. I didn’t graduate from high school, but I was up for an office in the mortgage department of Hamilton Trust. But nothing was moving. Of course, my not having an education was a drawback and they were laying people off, left and right. I just couldn’t make enough money to support four people and when I put the house up for sale I discover that every fucking house on the block is on the market. I thought about money all the time. I dreamed about money. I was picking dimes, nickels and pennies off the sidewalk. I was bananas about money. So I had a friend named Howie and he had this solution. He told me about this old guy—Masterman—who ran a stationery store in the shopping center. He had two seven-thousand-dollar pari-mutuel tickets. He kept them in a drawer beside his bed. Howie knew this because he used to let the old man blow him for a fin. Howie had this wife, kids, a wood-burning fireplace, but no money. So we decided to get the tickets. In those days you didn’t have to endorse them. It was fourteen thousand in cash and no way to trace it. So we watched the old man for a couple of nights. It was easy. He closed up the store at eight, drove home, got drunk, ate something and watched TV. So one night when he closed the store and got into his car we got into it with him. He was very obedient because I was holding this loaded gun against his head. This gun was Howie’s. He drove home and we lock-stepped him up to the front door, poking the gun into any soft part of him that was convenient. We marched him into the kitchen and handcuffed him to this big Goddamned refrigerator. It was very big, a very recent model. We asked him where the tickets was and he said they was in the lockbox. If we pistol-whipped him like he said we did, it wasn’t me. It could have been Howie, but I didn’t see it. He kept telling us the two tickets was in the bank. So then we turned the house upside down looking for tickets, but I guess he was right. So we turned on the TV for neighbors and left him chained to this ten-ton refrigerator and took off in his car. The first car we saw was a police car. This was just an accident, but we got scared. We drove his car into one of those car washes where you have to get out of the car when it hits the shower. We put the car in the slot and took off. We got a bus into Manhattan and said goodbye at the terminal.

  “But you know what that old sonofabitch Master-man did? He ain’t big and he ain’t strong, but he starts inching this big, fucking refrigerator across the kitchen floor. Believe me, it was enormous. It was really a nice house with lovely furniture and carpets and he must have had one hell of a time with all those carpets bunching up under the refrigerator, but he got out of the kitchen and down the hall and into the living room, where the telephone was. I can imagine what the police saw when they got there: this old man chained to a refrigerator in the middle of his living room with hand-painted pictures all over the walls. That was Thursday. They picked me up the following Tuesday. They already had Howie. I didn’t know it, but he already had a record. I don’t blame the state. I don’t blame nobody. We did everydiing wrong. Burglary, pistol-whipping, kidnapping. Kidnapping’s a big no-no. Of course, I’m the next thing to dead, but my wife and sons are still alive. So she sold the house at a big loss and goes on welfare. She comes to see me once in a while, but you know what the boys do? First they got permission to write me letters and then Michael, the big one, wrote me a letter saying that they would be on the river in a rowboat at three on Sunday and they would wave to me. I was out at the fence at three on Sunday and they showed up. They were way out in the river—you can’t come too close to the prison—but I could see them and feel my love for them and they waved their arms and I waved my arms. That was in the autumn and they stopped coming when the place where you rent boats shut down, but they started again in the spring. They were much bigger, I could see that, and then it occurs to me that for the length of time I’m here they’ll get married and have children and I know they won’t stuff their wives or their kids into no rowboat and go down the river to wave to old Daddy. So I ain’t got no future, Farragut, and you ain’t got no future either. So let’s go down and wash up for chow.”

  Farragut was working then part-time with the greenhouse crew, cutting lawns and hedges, and part-time as a typist, cutting ditto sheets for the prison announcements. He had the key to an office near the squad room and the use of a typewriter. He continued to meet Jody at the water tower and later, when the afternoons got cold, in his office. They had known one another a month when they became lovers. “I’m so glad you ain’t homosexual,” Jody kept saying when he caressed Farragut’s hair. Then, saying as much one afternoon, he had unfastened Farragut’s trousers and, with every assistance from Farragut, got them down around his knees. From what Farragut had read in the newspapers about prison life he had expected this to happen, but what he had not expected was that this grotesque bonding of their relationship would provoke in him so profound a love. Nor had he expected the administration to be so lenient. For a small ration of cigarettes, Tiny let Farragut return to the shop between chow and lockup. Jody met him there and they made love on the floor. “They like it,” Jody explained. “At first they didn’t like it. Then some psychologist decided that if we got our rocks moved regularly we wouldn’t riot. They’ll let us do anything if they think it will keep us from rioting. Move over, Chicken, move over. Oh, I love you very much.”