Falconer (19 page)

“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.”

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

They 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.

It 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?”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

He 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 frorit 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.

On 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.

The 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?”

The 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.

They 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.

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

“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.

“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 …’”

The 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 bis 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
.

“It was their choice,” said Eben.

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

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

On 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.”