Falconer (5 page)

“I’ll check,” said Tiny. “They’ll bring it up from the infirmary, I guess. You don’t get nothing until tomorrow morning.” Farragut didn’t need methadone then, but the morning threatened to usurp the facts of the night. He undressed, got into bed and watched the
news on TV. The news for the last two weeks had been dominated by a murderess. She had been given the usual characteristics. She and her husband lived in an expensive house in an exclusive community. The house was painted white, the grounds were planted with costly firs and the lawn and the hedges were beautifully maintained. Her character had been admired. She taught Sunday school and had been a den mother for the Girl Scouts. Her coffeecakes for the Trinity Church bake sale were famous and at PTA meetings she expressed herself with intelligence, character and charm. “Oh, she was so kind,” her neighbors said, “so clean, so friendly, she loved him so that I can’t imagine …” What they couldn’t imagine was that she had murdered her husband, carefully drained his blood and flushed it down the toilet, washed him clean and begun to rectify and improve his physique. First she decapitated the corpse and replaced his head with the drained head of a second victim. She then replaced his genitals with the genitals of her third victim and his feet with the feet of her fourth. It was when she invited a neighbor in to see this perfect man that suspicions had been aroused. She then vanished. Offers to exploit the remains for commercial purposes were being considered, but nothing had been agreed upon. Night after night the fragments of the tale ended with a draw-away shot of the serene white house, the specimen planting and the velvet lawn.

Lying in bed, Farragut felt his anxiety beginning to mount. He would be denied his fix in the morning. He would die. He would be murdered. He then remembered the times when his life had been threatened.
Firstly his father, having written Farragut’s name with his cock, had tried to erase the writing. One of his mother’s favorite stories was of the night that Farragut’s father brought a doctor to the house for dinner. Halfway through the dinner it turned out that the doctor was an abortionist and had been asked to dinner in order to kill Farragut. This, of course, he could not remember, but he could remember walking on a beach with his brother. This was on one of the Atlantic islands. At the tip of the island there was a narrows called Chilton Gut. “Swim?” his brother asked. His brother didn’t like to swim, but Farragut, it was well known, would strip and jump into any body of water. He got out of his clothes and was wading into the sea when some stranger, a fisherman, came running up the beach, shouting: “Stop, stop! What do you think you’re doing?” “I was going in for a dip,” said Farragut. “You’re crazy,” the stranger said. ‘The tide is turning and even if the rip doesn’t get you the sharks will. You can’t ever swim here. They ought to put up a sign—but at the rip tide you wouldn’t last a minute. You can’t ever swim here. They waste all the taxpayers’ money putting up traffic signs, speeding signs, yield signs, stop signs, but on a well-known deathtrap like this they don’t have any sign at all.” Farragut thanked the stranger and got back into his clothes. His brother had started down the beach. Eben must have jogged or run because he had put quite a distance between them. Farragut caught up with him and the first thing he asked was, “When is Louisa coming back from Denver? I know you’ve told me, but I’ve forgotten.” “Tuesday,” Eben said. “She’s staying over for Ruth’s wedding.” So
they walked back to the house, talking about Louisa’s visit. Farragut remembered being happy at the fact that he was alive. The sky was blue.

At a rehabilitation center in Colorado where Farragut had been confined to check his addiction, the doctors discovered that heroin had damaged his heart. His cure lasted thirty-eight days and before he was discharged he was given his instructions. He was being discharged as an outpatient. Because of his heart he could not, for six weeks, climb stairs, drive a car or exert himself in any way. He must avoid strenuous changes in temperature and above all excitement. Excitement of any sort would kill him. The doctor then used the classic illustration of the man who shoveled snow, entered a hot house and quarreled with his wife. It was as quick as a bullet through the head. Farragut flew east and his flight was uneventful. He got a cab to their apartment, where Marcia let him in. “Hi,” he said and bent to kiss her, but she averted her face. “I’m an outpatient,” he said. “A salt-free diet—not really salt-free, but no salt added. I can’t climb stairs or drive a car and I do have to avoid excitement. It seems easy enough. Maybe we could go to the beach.”

Marcia walked down the long hall to their bedroom and slammed the door. The noise of the sound was explosive and in case he had missed this she opened the door and slammed it again. The effect on his heart was immediate. He became faint, dizzy and short-winded. He staggered to the sofa in the living room and lay down. He was in too much pain and fear to realize that the homecoming of a drug addict was not romantic. He fell asleep. The daylight had begun to go when
he regained consciousness. His heart was still drumming, his vision was cloudy and he was very weak and frightened. He heard Marcia open the door to their room and come down the hall. “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked. Her tone was murderous.

“Some sort of kindness,” he said. He was helpless. “A little kindness.”

“Kindness?” she asked. “Do you expect kindness from me at a time like this? What have you ever done to deserve kindness? What have you ever given me? Drudgery. A superficial and a meaningless life. Dust. Cobwebs. Cars and cigarette lighters that don’t work. Bathtub rings, unfinished toilets, an international renown for sexual depravity, clinical alcoholism and drug addiction, broken arms, legs, brain concussions and now a massive attack of heart failure. That’s what you’ve given me to live with, and now you expect kindness.” The drumming of his heart worsened, his vision got dimmer and he fell asleep, but when he awoke Marcia was cooking something in the kitchen and he was still alive.

Eben entered again. It was at a party in a New York brownstone. Some guests were leaving and he stood in an open window, shouting goodbye. It was a large window and he was standing on the sill. Below him was an areaway with an iron fence of palings, cast to look like spears. As he stood in the window, someone gave him a swift push. He jumped or fell out the window, missed the iron spears and landed on his knees on the paving. One of the departing guests returned and helped him to his feet and he went on talking about when they would meet again. He did this to avoid looking
back at the window to see, if he might, who had pushed him. That he didn’t want to know. He had sprained an ankle and bruised a knee, but he refrained from thinking about the incident again. Many years later, walking in the woods, Eben had suddenly asked: “Do you remember that party at Sarah’s when you got terribly drunk and someone pushed you out the window?” “Yes,” said Farragut. “I’ve never told you who it was,” said Eben. “It was that man from Chicago.” Farragut thought that his brother had incriminated himself with this remark, but Eben seemed to feel exonerated. He braced his shoulders, lifted his head to the light and began to kick the leaves on the path vigorously.

The lights and the TV went off. Tennis began to ask: “Have you been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?” Farragut, lying on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent upon chance smells—grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and indisposed. Waking in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant him a bearing, but he was left mostly with methadone and his unruly keel. He seemed, in prison, to be a traveler and he had traveled in enough strange countries to recognize this keen alienation. It was the sense that on waking before
dawn, everything, beginning with the dream from which he waked, was alien. He had dreamed in another language and felt on waking the texture and smell of strange bedclothes. From the window came the strange smell of strange fuels. He bathed in strange and rusty water, wiped his ass on strange and barbarous toilet paper and climbed down unfamiliar stairs to be served a strange and profoundly offensive breakfast. That was travel. It was the same here. Everything he saw, touched, smelled and dreamed of was cruelly alien, but this continent or nation in which he might spend the rest of his living days had no flag, no anthem, no monarch, president, taxes, boundaries or graves.

He slept poorly and felt haggard when he woke. Chicken Number Two brought him gruel and coffee, but his heart was moving along with his watch. If the methadone didn’t come at nine he would begin to die. It would not be anything that he could walk into, like an electric chair or a noose. At five minutes to nine he began to shout at Tiny. “I want my fix, it’s time for my fix, just let me get down to the infirmary and get my fix.” “Well, he has to take care of the line down there,” Tiny said. “Home deliveries don’t come until later.” “Maybe they don’t make home deliveries,” said Farragut. He sat on his cot, closed his eyes and tried to force himself into unconsciousness. This lasted a few minutes. Then he roared: “Get me my fix, for Jesus Christ’s sake!” Tiny went on figuring work sheets, but Farragut could barely see him. The rest of the men who hadn’t gone to shop began to watch. There was no one else in cell lock but the Cuckold. Then Chisholm, the deputy warden, came in with two other assholes. “I hear you
got a withdrawal show scheduled,” he said. “Yeah,” said Tiny. “It’s not my idea.” He didn’t look up from his work sheets. “Take any empty table. The floor show’s about to begin.”

Farragut had begun to sweat from his armpits, crotch and brow. Then the sweat flowed down his ribs and soaked his trousers. His eyes were burning. He could still marshal the percentiles. He would lose fifty percent vision. When the sweat was in full flood, he began to shake. This began with his hands. He sat on them, but then his head began to wag. He stood. He was shaking all over. Then his right arm flew out. He pulled it back. His left knee jerked up into the air. He pushed it down, but it went up again and began to go up and down like a piston. He fell and beat his head on the floor, trying to achieve the reasonableness of pain. Pain would give him peace. When he realized that he could not reach pain this way, he began the enormous struggle to hang himself. He tried fifteen or a million times before he was able to get his hand on his belt buckle. His hand flew away and after another long struggle he got it back to the buckle and unfastened it. Then, on his knees, with his head still on the floor, he jerked the belt out of the loops. The sweat had stopped. Convulsions of cold racked him. No longer even on his knees, but moving over the floor like a swimmer, he got to the chair, looped the buckle onto itself for a noose and fastened the belt to a nail on the chair. He was trying to strangle himself when Chisholm said: “Cut the poor prick down and get his fix.” Tiny unlocked the cell door. Farragut couldn’t see much, but he could see this, and the instant the cell was unlocked he sprang to
his feet, collided with Tiny and was halfway out the cell and running for the infirmary when Chisholm brained him with a chair. He came to in the infirmary with his left leg in a plaster cast and half his head in bandages. Tiny was there in civilian clothes. “Farragut, Farragut,” he asked, “why is you an addict?”

Farragut didn’t reply. Tiny patted him on the head. “I’ll bring you in some fresh tomatoes tomorrow. My wife puts up fifty jars of tomato sauce. We have tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and supper. But I still got tomatoes left over. I’ll bring some in tomorrow. You want anything else?”

“No, thank you,” said Farragut. “I’d like some tomatoes.”

“Why is you an addict?” asked Tiny, and he went away.

Farragut was not disconcerted by the question, but he was provoked. It was only natural that he should be an addict. He had been raised by people who dealt in contraband. Not hard drugs, but unlicensed spiritual, intellectual and erotic stimulants. He was the citizen, the product of some border principality such as Liechtenstein. His background lacked the mountainous scenery, but his passport was fat with visas, he dealt in spiritual contraband, spoke four languages poorly and knew the words to four national anthems. Once when he was sitting in a café in Kitzbühel with his brother, listening to a band concert, Eben suddenly sprang to his feet and clapped his Tyrolean hat over his heart. “What’s up?” Farragut asked, and Eben said, “They are about to play the national anthem.” What the band was about to play was “Home on the Range,” but Farragut
remembered this to illustrate the fact that his family had endeavored to be versatile at every political, spiritual and erotic level. It helped to explain the fact that he was an addict.

Farragut could remember his mother coming down a circular staircase in a coral-colored dress heavily embroidered with pearls on her way to hear
Tosca
; and he could remember her pumping gas on the main road to Cape Cod at that memorable point in the landscape where scrub pine takes over and the nearness of the Great Atlantic Ocean can be read in the pallor of the sky and the salt air. His mother didn’t actually wear tennis sneakers, but she wore some kind of health shoe and her dress was much lower in the bow than in the stern. He could remember her casually and repeatedly regretting invitations to dine with the Trenchers, who were famous in the village for having, in the space of a week, bought both a pipe organ and a yacht. The Trenchers were millionaires—they were arrivistes—they had a butler; but then, the Farraguts had run through several butlers—Mario, Fender and Chadwick—and now claimed to enjoy setting their own table. The Farraguts were the sort of people who had lived in a Victorian mansion and when this was lost had moved back to the family homestead. This included a shabby and splendid eighteenth-century house and the franchise on two Socony gas pumps that stood in front of the house where Grandmother’s famous rose garden had been. When the news got out that they had lost all their money and were going to run a gas station, Farragut’s Aunt Louisa came directly to the house and, standing in the hallway, exclaimed: “You cannot pump
gasoline!” “Why not?” asked Farragut’s mother. Aunt Louisa’s chauffeur came in and put a box of tomatoes on the floor. He wore puttees. “Because,” said Aunt Louisa, “you will lose all your friends.” “To the contrary,” said Farragut’s mother. “I shall discover precisely who they are.”