Falconer

The main entrance to Falconer--the only entrance for convicts, their visitors and the staff--was crowned by an escutcheon representing Liberty, Justice and, between the two, the power of legislation. Liberty wore a tnobcap and carried a pike. Legislation was the Federal eagle, armed with hunting arrows. Justice was conventional; blinded, vaguely erotic in her clinging robes and armed with a headsman's sword. The bas-relief was bronze but black these days--as black as unpolished anthracite or onyx. How many hundreds had passed under this--this last souvenir they would see of man's struggle for coherence? Hundreds, one guessed, thousands, millions was close. Above the escutcheon was a declension of the place names: Falconer Jail, 1871, Falconer Reformatory, Falconer Federal Penitentiary, Falconer State Prison, Falconer Correctional Facility, Falconer Rehabilitation Center and the last, which had never caught on: Phoenix House. Now cons were inmates, the assholes were officers and the warden was a superintendent. Fame is chancy, God knows, but Falconer--with its limited accommodations for 2000 miscreants--was as famous as Old Bailey. Gone were the water torture, the striped suits, the lock step, the balls and chains, and there was a Softball field where the gallows had stood; but at the time of which I'm writing, leg irons were still used in Auburn. You could tell the men from Auburn by the noise they made.

Loomis (fratricide, zip to ten, number 734-508-32) saw none of this from the catwalk of an abandoned water tower where he goldbricked with his friend Jody. He had seen the escutcheon and would not, he thought sadly, ever see it again. After less than a year, he was still sad. What he could see were the old cell blocks and, beyond those, a two-mile stretch of river with cliffs and mountains on the western shore. This was best seen from the old death house and was known as The Millionaire's View. It was a warm afternoon in July and Jody was telling his story. Jody was crowding 30, claimed to be 24 and could pass. He had an American face--very clean, princely in some of its angles and responses, but without a hair, a grain, a trace of nostalgia. It was charming, easy and as persuasive as a poster, but peel it off the hoarding and there was nothing left but the hoarding. He had told his story piecemeal to Loomis, but patched together, the definitive version--and there were many--went like this: "It's really in the past. I don't have any future and I'm heavy on the past. I won't see the parole board for 12 years. What I do around here doesn't matter much, but I do like to stay out of the hole. I know there's no medical evidence for brain damage, but after you've hit yourself about 14 times, you get silly. Anyhow, I was indicted on 53 counts. I had a $45,000 house in Levittown, a lovely wife and two great sons, Michael and Dale. But I was in a bind. I don't think people with your kind of lifestyle understand. I hadn't graduated from high school, but I was up for a vice-presidency in the mortgage department of Fiduciary Trust. Nothing was moving, my lack of education was a drawback and they were laying people off. I just couldn't make enough money to support four people and when I put the house up for sale, I discovered that every house on the block was on the market. I thought about money all the time. I dreamed about money. I picked dimes, nickels and pennies off the sidewalk. I was bananas about money. I had a friend named Howie and he had a solution. He told me about this old guy-- Massman--who ran a stationery store in the shopping center. He had two pari-mutuel tickets worth $7000 each. 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 a wife, kids, a wood-burning fireplace but no money. We decided to go after the tickets. In those days, you didn't have to register them. It was $14,000 in cash and no way of tracing 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. One night, when he closed the store and got into his car, we got in with him. He was very obedient, because I was holding a loaded gun against his head. The gun was Howie's. He drove home and we lock-stepped him up to the front door, poking the gun into any 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 were and he said they were 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 that the tickets were in the bank. So then we turned the house upside down looking for the tickets, but I guess he was right. So we turned on the TV for the 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 Massman's 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. You know what that old son of a bitch Massman did? He wasn't big and he wasn't strong and he wasn't young, but he started 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. We did everything wrong. Burglary, pistol-whipping, kidnaping. Kidnaping's a big no-no. Of course, I'm the next thing to dead, but my wife and my sons are still alive. She sold the house at a big loss and went 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 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 afternoon 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. Oh, shit! 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 crossed my mind lhat for the length of time I'm here, they'll get married and have children and I know they won't stuff their wives and their children into a rowboat and go down-river to wave to Daddy...."

"734-508-32, you got a visitor." It was the public address.

"That's you," said Jody. "Who do you think it is?"

"My wife, I guess. She hasn't been here for three months. It could be someone selling subscriptions or encyclopedias. It could be my lawyer. It might be my son."

Loomis climbed down the ladder, rust on his hands, jogged up the road past the firehouse and into the tunnel. It was four flights up to cell block F. "Visitor," he said to the guard who let him into his cell. He kept a white shirt for visits. This was dusty. He washed his face and combed his hair with water.

"Don't take nuttin' but a handkerchief," said the guard.

"I know, I know, I know...." Down he went to the door of the visitors' room, where he was frisked. Through the glass, he saw that his visitor was Marcia.

There were no bars in the visitors' room, but die glass windows were chickenwired and open only at the top. A skinny cat couldn't get in or out, but die sounds of the prison moved in freely on the breeze. She would, he knew, have passed three sets of bars--clang, clang, clang-- and waited in an anteroom where there were pews or benches, soft-drink machines and a display of the convicts' art with prices stuck in the frames. None of the cons could paint, but you could always count on some wet-brain to buy a vase of roses or a marine sunset if he had been told that the artist was a lifer. There were no pictures on the walls of the visitors' room, but there were four signs that said: No Smoking, No Writing, No Exchange of Objects. Visitors are Allowed one kiss. This was also in Spanish. No Smoking had been scratched out. The visitors' room in Falconer, he knew, was the most lenient in the East. There were no obstructions--nothing but a three-foot counter between the free and the unfree. While he was being frisked, he looked around at the other visitors--not so much out of curiosity as to see if there was anything there that might offend Marcia. A con was holding a baby. A weeping old woman talked to a young man. Nearest to Marcia was a chicano couple. The woman was beautiful and die man was caressing her bare arms.

Loomis stepped into this no man's land and came on hard, as if he had been catapidted by circumstance into the visit. "Hello, darling," he exclaimed, as he had exclaimed "Hello, darling," at trains, boats, airports, the foot of the driveway, journey's end; but in the past, he would have worked out a timetable, aimed at the soonest possible sexual consummation.

"Hello," she said. "You look well."

"Thank you. You look beautiful."

"I didn't tell you I was coming because it didn't seem necessary. When I called to make an appointment, they told me you weren't going anywhere."

"That's true."

"I haven't been here sooner because I've been in Jamaica with Gussie."

"That sounds great. How's Gussie?"

"Fat. She's gotten terribly fat."

"Are you getting a divorce?"

"Not now. I don't feel like talking with any more lawyers at this point."

"Divorce is your prerogative."

"I know." She looked at the chicano couple. The man had stroked his way up to the hair in the girl's armpits. Both their eyes were shut.

"What," she asked, "do you find to talk about with these people?"

"I don't see much of them," he said, "excepting at chow, and we can't talk then. You see, I'm in cell block F. It's sort of a forgotten place. Like Piranesi. Last Tuesday, they forgot to spring us for supper."

"What is your cell like?"

"Twelve by seven," he said. "The only things that belong to me are the Miro print, the Descartes and a colored photograph of you and Peter. It's an old one. I took it when we had a house on the Vineyard. How is Peter?"

"Fine."

"Will he ever come to see me?"

"I don't know, I really don't know. He doesn't ask for you. The social worker thinks that, for the general welfare, it's best at the moment that he not see his father in jail for murder."

"Could you bring me a photograph?"

"I could if I had one."

"Couldn't you take one?"

"You know I'm no good with a camera."

Someone on cell block B struck a fivestring banjo and began to sing: "I got those cell-block blues /I'm feeling blue all the time / I got those cell-block blues / Fenced in by walls I can't climb...." He was good. The voice and the banjo were loud, clear and true and brought into that border country the fact that it was a summer afternoon all over that part of the world. Out of the window Loomis could see some underwear and fatigues hung out to dry. They moved in the breeze as if this movement--like the movements of ants, bees and geese-- had some polar ordination. For a moment, he felt himself to be a man of the world, a world to which his responsiveness was marvelous and absurd.

Marcia opened her bag and looked for something. "The Army must have been a good preparation for this experience," she said.

"Sort of," he said.

"I never understood why you so liked the Army."

He heard, from the open space in front of the main entrance, a guard shouting: "You're going to be good boys, aren't you? You're going to be good boys. You're going to be good, good, good boys." Manacled in groups of ten, looking utterly bewildered and (if they were young) gazing up at the blue sky with an innocence that seemed divine, they would go under the escutcheon, under Liberty, Justice and Legislation. He heard the dragging ring of metal and guessed they'd come from Auburn.

"Oh, damn it," she said. Peevishness darkened her face. "Oh, goddamn it," she said with pure indignation.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I can't find my Kleenex," she said. She was foraging in the bag.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Everything seems to fight me today," she said, "absolutely everything." She dumped the contents of her bag onto the counter.

"Lady, lady," said the turnkey who sat above them on an elevated chair like a lifeguard. "Lady, you ain't allowed to have nothing on the counter but soft drinks and butt cans."

"I," she said, "am a taxpayer. I help to support this place. It costs me more to keep my husband in here than it costs me to send my son to a good school."

"Lady, lady, please," he said. "Get that stuff off the counter or I'll have to kick you out."

She found the small box of paper and pushed the contents of her handbag back to where they belonged. Then Loomis covered her hand with his. deeply thrilled at this recollection of his past. She pulled her hand away, but why? Had she let him touch her for a minute, the warmth, the respite would have lasted for weeks. "Well," she said, regaining her composure, her beauty, he thought.

The light in the room was unkind, but she was equal to its harshness. She had been an authenticated beauty. Several photographers had asked her to model, although her breasts, marvelous for nursing and love, were a little too big for that line of work. "I'm much too shy, much too lazy," she had said. She had accepted the compliment, her beauty had been documented.

"You know," his son had said. "I can't talk to Mummy when there's a mirror in the room. She's really balmy about her looks."

Narcissus was a man and he couldn't make the switch, but she had, maybe 12 or 14 times, stood in front of the fulllength mirror in their bedroom and asked him: "Is there another woman of my age in this county who is as beautiful as I?" She had been naked, overwhelmingly so, and he had thought this an invitation; but when he touched her, she said: "Stop fussing with my breasts. I'm beautiful." She was, too.

He knew that after she'd left, whoever had seen her--the turnkey, for instance-- would say: "If that was your wife, you're lucky. Outside the movies, I never seen anyone so beautiful."

If she was Narcissa, did the rest of the Freudian doctrine follow? He had never, within his limited judgment, taken this very seriously. She had spent three weeks in Rome with her old roommate, Maria Lippincot Hastings Gugliemi. Three marriages, a fat settlement for each and a very unsavory sexual reputation. They then had no maid and he and Peter had cleaned the house, laid and lighted fires and bought flowers to celebrate her return from Italy. He met her at Kennedy. The plane was late. It was after midnight. When he bent to kiss her, she averted her face and pulled down die floppy brim of her new Roman hat. He got her bags, got the car and they started home. "You seem to have had a marvelous time," he said.

"I have never," she said, "been so happy in my life." He jumped to no conclusions. The fires would be burning, the flowers gleaming. In that part of the world, the ground was covered with dirty snow.

"Was there any snow in Rome?" he asked.

"Not in the city," she said. "There was a little snow on the Via Cassia. I didn't see it. I read about it in the paper. Nothing so revolting as this."

He carried the bags into the living room. Peter was there in his pajamas. She embraced him and cried a little. The fires and the flowers missed her by a mile. He could try to kiss her again, but he knew that he might get a right to the jaw. "Can I get you a drink?" he asked, making the offer in a voice that rose.

"I guess so," she said, dropping an octave.

"Limone?" he asked.

"Si, si," she said, "un spritz."

He got the ice and the lemon peel and handed her the drink. "Put it on the table," she said. "Campari will remind me of my lost happiness." She went into the kitchen, wet a sponge and began to wash the door of the refrigerator.

"We cleaned the place," he said with genuine sadness. "Peter and I cleaned (continued on page 188)Falconer(continued from page 154) the place. Peter mopped the kitchen floor."

"Well, you seem to have forgotten the refrigerator door," she said.

"If there are angels in heaven," he said, "and if they are women, I expect they must put down their harps quite frequently to mop drainboards, refrigerator doors, any enameled surface. It seems to be a secondary female characteristic."

"Are you crazy?" she asked. "I don't know what you're talking about."

His cock, so recently ready for fun, retreated from Waterloo to Paris and from Paris to Elba. "Almost everyone I love has called me crazy," he said. "What I'd like to talk about is love."

"Oh, is that it?" she said. "Well, here you go." She put her thumbs into her ears, wagged her fingers, crossed her eyes and made a loud farting sound with her tongue.

"I wish you wouldn't make faces," he said.

"I wish you wouldn't look like that," she said. "Thank God you can't see the way you look." He said nothing more, since he knew that Peter was listening.

It took her that time about ten days to come around. It was after a cocktail party and before a dinner. They took a nap, she in his arms. They were one, he thought. The fragrant skein of her hair lay across his face. Her breathing was heavy. When she awoke, she touched his face and asked: "Did I snore?"

"Terribly," he said. "You sounded like a chain saw."

"It was a lovely sleep," she said. "I love to sleep in your arms." Then they made love. His imagery for a big orgasm was winning the sailboat race, the Renaissance, high mountains. "Christ, that felt good," she said. "What time is it?"

"Seven," he said.

"When are we due?"

"Eight."

"You've had your bath. I'll take mine."

He dried her with a Kleenex and passed her a lighted cigarette. He followed her into the bathroom and sat on the shut toilet seat while she washed her back with a brush. "I forgot to tell you," he said. "Liza sent us a wheel of brie."

"That's nice," she said, "but you know what? Brie gives me terribly loose bowels."

He hitched up his genitals and crossed his legs. "That's funny," he said. "It constipates me."

That was their marriage then; not the highest paving of the stair, the clatter of Italian fountains, the wind in the alien olive trees but this, a jay-naked male and female discussing their bowels.

One more time. It was when they still bred dogs. Hannah, the bitch, had whelped a litter of eight. Seven were in the kennel behind the house. One, a sickly runt that would die, had been let in. Loomis was awakened, around three, from a light sleep by the noise of the puppy vomiting or defecating. He slept naked and naked he left the bed, trying not to disturb Marcia, and went down to the living room. There was a mess under the piano. The puppy was trembling. "That's all right, Gordo," he said. Peter had named the puppy Gordon Cooper. It was that long ago. He got a mop, a bucket and some paper towels and crawled bare-assed under the piano to clean up the shit. He had disturbed her and he heard her come down the stairs. She wore a transparent nightgown and everything was to be seen. "I'm sorry I disturbed you," he said. "Gordo had an accident."

"I'll help," she said.

"You needn't," he said. "It's almost done."

"But I want to," she said. On her hands and knees, she joined him under the piano. When it was done, she stood and struck her head on that part of the piano that overlaps the bulk of the instrument. "Oh," she said.

"Did you hurt yourself?" he asked.

"Not terribly," she said. "I hope I won't have a bump or a shiner."

"I'm sorry, my darling," he said. He stood, embraced her, kissed her and they made love on the sofa. He lighted a cigarette for her and they returned to bed.

But it wasn't much after this that the stepped into the kitchen to get some ice and found her embracing and kissing Sally Midland, with whom she did crewelwork twice a week. He thought the embrace was not Platonic and he detested Sally. "Excuse me," he said.

"What for?" Marcia asked.

"I broke wind," he said. That was nasty and lie knew it. He carried the ice tray into the pantry. She was silent during dinner and for the rest of the evening. When they awoke the next day--Saturday--he asked: "Good morning, darling?"

"Shit," she said. She put on her wrapper and went to the kitchen, where he heard her kick the refrigerator and then the dishwasher. "I hate you broken-down, fucking, second-rate appliances!" she shouted. "I hate, hate, hate this fucking, dirty, old-fashioned kitchen! 'I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls.'" This was ominous, he knew, and the omens meant that he would get no breakfast. When she was distempered, she regarded the breakfast eggs as if she had laid and hatched them. The egg, the egg for breakfast! The egg was like some sibyl in an Attic drama.

"May I have eggs for breakfast?" he had once asked, years and years ago.

"Do you expect me to prepare breakfast in this House of Usher?" she had asked.

"Could I cook myself some eggs?" he asked.

"You may not," she said. "You will make such a mess in this ruin that it will take hours for me to clean it up."

On such a morning, he knew, he would be lucky to get a cup of coffee. When he dressed and went down, her face was still very dark and this made him feel much more grievous than hungry. How could he repair this? He saw, out of the window, that there had been a frost, the first. The sun had risen, but the hoarfrost stood in the shadow of the house and the trees with a Euclidean preciseness. It was after the first frost that you cut the fox grapes she liked for jelly. Not much bigger than raisins, black, gamy, he thought perhaps that a bag of fox grapes would do the trick. He was scrupulous about the sexual magic of tools. This could be anxiety or the fact that they had once summered in southwestern Ireland, where tools had been male and female and the west meant death. He would, carrying a basket and shears, have felt like a transvestite. He chose a burlap sack and a hunting knife. He went into the woods--half or three quarters of a mile from the house--to where there was a stand of fox grapes against a stand of pines. The exposure was due east and they were ripe, blackish purple and rimed with frost in the shade. He cut them with his manly knife and slapped them into the crude sack. He cut them for her, but who was she? Sally Midland's lover? Yes, yes, yes! Face the facts. What he faced was either the biggest of falsehoods or the biggest of truths, but, in any case, a sense of reasonableness enveloped and supported him. But if she loved Sally Midland, didn't he love Chucky Drew? He liked to be with Chucky Drew, but standing side by side in the shower, lie thought that Chucky looked like a diseased chicken with flabby arms like the arms of those women who used to play bridge with his mother. He had not loved a man, he thought, since he had left the boy scouts. So, with his bag of wild grapes, he returned to the house, burs on his trousers, his brow bitten by the last flies of that year. She had gone back to bed. She lay there with her face in the pillow. "I picked some grapes," he said. "We had the first frost last night. I picked some fox grapes for jelly."

"Thank you," she said, into the pillow.

"I'll leave them in the kitchen," he said.

He spent the rest of the day preparing the house for winter. He took down the screens and put up the storm windows, banked the rhododendrons with raked and acid oak leaves, checked the oil level in the fuel tank and sharpened his skates. He worked along with numerous hornets that bumped against the eaves, looking, even as he, for some sanctuary for the coming ice age.

"It was partly because we stopped doing things together," he said. "We used to do so much together. We used to sleep together, travel together, ski, skate, sail, go to concerts; we did everything together; we watched the world series and drank beer together, although neither of us likes beer, not in this country. That was the year Lomberg, whatever his name was. missed a no-hitter by half an inning. You cried. I did, too. We cried together."

"You had your fix," she said. "We couldn't do that together."

"But I was clean for six months," he said. "It didn't make any difference. Cold turkey. It nearly killed me."

"Six months is not a lifetime," she said, "and anyhow, how long ago was that?"

"Your point," he said.

"How are you now?"

"I'm down from forty-four c.c.s to thirty-seven. I get methadone at nine every morning. A pansy deals it out. He wears a hairpiece."

"Is he on the make?"

"I don't know. He asked me if I liked opera."

"You don't, of course."

"That's what I told him."

"That's good. I wouldn't want to be married to a homosexual, having already married a homicidal drug addict."

"I did not kill my brother."

"You struck him with a fire iron. He died."

"I struck him with a fire iron. He was drunk. He hit his head on the hearth."

"All penologists say that all convicts claim innocence."

"Confucius say...."

"You're so superficial, Loomis. You've always been a light--"

"I did not kill my brother."

"Shall we change the subject?"

"Please."

"When do you think you'll be clean?"

"I don't know. I find it difficult to imagine cleanliness. I can claim to imagine this, but it would be false. It would be as though I had claimed to reinstall myself in some afternoon of my youth."

"That's why you're a lightweight."

"Yes."

He did not want a quarrel, not there, not ever again with her. He had observed, in the last year of their marriage, that the lines of a quarrel were as close to ordination as the words and the sacrament of holy matrimony. "I don't have to listen to your shit anymore!" she had screamed. He was astonished, not at her hysteria but at the fact that she had taken the words out of his mouth. "You've ruined my life, you've ruined my life!" she screamed. "There is nothing on earth as cruel as a rotten marriage." This was all on the tip of his tongue. But then, listening for her to continue to anticipate his thinking, he heard her voice, deepened and softened with true grief, begin a variation that was not in his power. "You are the biggest mistake I ever made," she said softly. "1 thought that my life was one hundred percent frustration, but when you killed your brother, I saw that I had underestimated my problems."

When she spoke of frustration, she sometimes meant the frustration of her career as a painter, which had begun and ended by her winning second prize at an art show in college, 25 years ago. He had been called a bitch by a woman he deeply loved and he had always kept this possibility in mind. The woman had called him a bitch when they were both jay-naked in the upper floor of a good hotel. She then kissed him and said: "Let's pour whiskey all over each other and drink it." They had, and he could not doubt the judgment of such a woman. So bitchily, perhaps, he went over Marcia's career as a painter. When they first met, she had lived in a studio and occupied herself mostly with painting. When they married, the Times had described her as a painter and every apartment and house they lived in had a studio. She painted and painted and painted. When guests came for dinner, they were shown her paintings. She had her paintings photographed and sent to galleries. She had exhibited in public parks, streets and flea markets. She had carried her paintings up 57th Street, 63rd Street, 72nd Street, she had applied for grants, awards, admission to subsidized painting colonies, she had painted and painted and painted, but her work had never been received with any enthusiasm at all. He understood, he tried to understand, bitch that he was. This was her vocation, as powerful, he guessed, as the love of God. and like some starcrossed priest, her prayers misfired. This had its rueful charms.

Her passion for independence had reached into her manipulation of their joint checking account. The independence of women was nothing at all new to him. His experience was broad, if not exceptional. His great-grandmother had been twice around the Horn, under sail. She was supercargo, of course, the captain's wife, but this had not protected her from great storms at sea, loneliness, the chance of mutiny and death or worse. His grandmother had wanted to be a fireman. She was pre-Freudian but not humorless about this. "I love bells," she said, "ladders, hoses, the thunder and crash of water. Why can't I volunteer for the fire department?" His mother had been an unsuccessful businesswoman-- the manager of tearooms, restaurants, dress shops and, at one time, the owner of a factory that turned out handbags, painted cigarette boxes and doorstops. Marcia's thrust for independence was not, he knew, the burden of his company but the burden of history.

He had caught on to the checkbook manipulation almost as soon as it began. She had a little money of her own but scarcely enough to pay for her clothes. She was dependent upon him and was determined, since she couldn't correct this situation, to conceal it. She had begun to have tradesmen cash checks and then claim that the money had been spent for the maintenance of the house. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters and painters didn't quite understand what she was doing, but she was solvent and they didn't mind cashing her checks. When Loomis discovered this, he knew that her motive was independence. She must have known that he knew. Since they were both knowledgeable, what was the point of bringing it up unless he wanted a shower of tears, which was the last thing he wanted?

"And how," he asked, "is the house?"

He did not use the possessive pronoun-- my house, your house, our house. It was still his house and would be until she got a divorce. She didn't reply. She did not draw on her gloves, finger by finger, or touch her hair or resort to any of the soap-opera chestnuts used to express contempt. She was sharper than that.

"Well," she said, "it's nice to have a dry toilet seat."

"Goodbye," he said to her back. He jogged out of the visitors' room and up the stairs to cell block F. He hung his white shirt on a hanger and went to the window, where, for the space of about a loot, he could focus on two steps of the entrance and the sidewalk the visitors would take on their way to cars, taxis or the train. He waited for them to emerge like a waiter in an Americanplan hotel waiting for the dining-room doors to open, like a lover, like a drought-ruined farmer waiting for rain but without the sense of the universality of waiting, that waiting was the human condition.

They appeared--one, three, four, two--27 in all. It was a weekday. Chicanos, blacks, whites, his upper-class wife with her bell-shaped coif--whatever was fashionable that year. She had been to the hairdresser before she came to the prison. Had she said as much? "I'm not going to a party, I'm going to jail to see my husband." He remembered the women in the sea before Sally Ecbatan's coming out. They all swam a breast stroke to keep their hair dry. Now some of the visitors carried paper bags in which they took home the contraband they had tried lo pass on to their loved ones. They were free, free to run, jump, fuck, drink, book a seat on the Tokyo plane. They were free, and yet they moved so casually through this precious element that it seemed wasted on them. There was no appreciation of freedom in the way they moved. A man stooped to pull up his socks. A woman rooted through her handbag to make sure she had the keys. A younger woman, glancing at the overcast sky, put up a green umbrella. An old and very ugly woman dried her tears with a scrap of paper. These were their constraints, the signs of their confinement, but there was some naturalness, some unself-consciousness about their imprisonment that he, watching them between bars, cruelly lacked.

This was not pain, nothing so simple and clear as that. All he could identify was some disturbance in his tear ducts, a blind, unthinking wish to cry. Tears were easy; a good ten-minute hand job. He wanted to cry and howl. He was among the living dead, but that was a chestnut. There were no words, no living words to suit this grief, this cleavage. He was primordial man confronted with romantic love. His eyes began to water as the last of the visitors, the last shoe disappeared. He sat on his bunk and took in his right hand the most interesting, worldly, responsive and nostalgic object in the cell. "Speed it up," said the cuckold. "You only got eight minutes to chow."

The night that followed would go down in the memory of Falconer as deeply as the night of the last executions. Loomis queued up for supper. They had rice, franks, bread, oleomargarine and half a canned peach. He palmed three slices of bread for his cat and jogged up to cell block F. Jogging gave him the illusion of freedom. Tiny was sitting down to his supper of outside food at his desk at the end of the block. He had on his plate a nice London broil, three baked potatoes, a can of peas, and on another plate a whole store cake. Loomis sighed loudly when he smelled the meat. Food was a recently revealed truth in his life. He had reasoned that the Holy Eucharist was nutritious if you got enough of it. In some churches, at some times, they had baked the bread--hot, fragrant and crusty--in the chancel. "Eat this in memory of Me." Food had something to do with his beginnings as a Christian and a man. To cut short a breast feeding, he had read somewhere, was traumatic, and from what he remembered of his mother, she might have yanked her breast out of his mouth in order not to be late for her bridge game; but this was coming close to self-pity and he had tried to leech self-pity out of his emotional spectrum. Food was food, hunger was hunger and his half-empty belly and the perfume of roast meat established a rapport that it would take the Devil to cut in two. "Eat good," he said to Tiny. A telephone was ringing in another room. The TV was on and the majority had picked, through a rigged ballot, some game show. The irony of TV, played out against any form of life or death, was superficial and fortuitous.

So as you lay dying, as you stood at the barred window watching the empty square, you heard the voice of a man, a halfman, the sort of person you wouldn't have spoken to at school or college, the victim of a bad barber, tailor and make-up artist, exclaim: "We present with pleasure to Mrs. Charles Alcorn of 11235 275th Boulevard the four-door cathedral-size refrigerator containing 200 pounds of prime beef and enough staples to feed a family of six for two months. This includes pet food. Don't you cry, Mrs. Alcorn, oh, darling, don't you cry, don't you cry.... And to the oilier contestants, a complete kit of the sponsor's product." The time for banal irony, the voice-over, he thought, is long gone. Give me the chords, the deep rivers, the unchanging profundity of nostalgia, love and death.

Tiny had begun to roar. He was usually a reasonable man, but now his voice was high, shattering, crazy. "You rat-fucking, cock-sucking, ass-tonguing, sneaky, stinking fleabag."

Obscenities recalled for Loomis the long-ago war with Germany and Japan. "In a fucking line rifle company," he or anyone else might have said, "you get the fucking, malfunctioning M-ls, fucking '03s instead of fucking carbines, fucking obsolete BARs and fucking 60-millimeter mortars, where you have to set the fucking sight to bracket the fucking target." Obscenity worked on their speech like a tonic, giving it force and structure, but the word fucking, so much later, had for Loomis the dim force of a recollection. Fucking meant M-ls, 60-pound packs, landing nets, the stinking Pacific island with Tokyo Rose coming over the radio. Now Tiny's genuine outburst unearthed a past, not very vivid, because there was no sweetness in it, but a solid, memorable four years of his life.

The cuckold passed and Loomis asked: "What's wrong with Tiny?"

"Oh, don't you know?" said the cuckold. "He had just begun his dinner when the deputy called him on the outside phone to check on work sheets. When he got back, a couple of cats, big cats, had finished off his steak and potatoes, shit in his plate and were halfway through his cake. He tore the head off one of them. The other got away. When he was tearing off the cat's head, he got very badly bitten. He's bleeding and bleeding. I guess he's gone to the infirmary."

If prisons were constructed to make any living thing happy, it might have been cats, although the sententiousness of this observation made Loomis irritable. But the fact was that trained men with drawing boards, hod carriers, mortar and stone had constructed buildings to deny their own kind a fair measure of freedom. The cats profited most. Even the fattest of them, the 60-pounders, could ease their way between the bars, where there were plenty of rats and mice for the hunters, lovelorn men for the tender and the teases, and franks, meatballs, day-old bread and oleomargarine to eat.

Loomis had seen the cats of Luxor, Cairo and Rome, but with everybody going around the world these days and writing cards and sometimes books about it, there wasn't much point in linking the shadowy cats of prison to the shadowy-cats of the ancient world. As a dog breeder, lie had not much liked cats, but lie had changed. There were more cats in Falconer than there were convicts, and there were 2000 convicts. Make it 4000 cats. Their smell overwhelmed everything, but they checked the rat-and-mice population. Loomis had a favorite. So did everybody else--some had as many as six. Some of the men's wives brought them kitty chow--stuff like I hat. Loneliness taught the intransigent to love their cats as loneliness can change anything on earth. They were warm, they were hairy, they were living and they gave fleeting glimpses of demonstrativeness, intelligence, uniqueness and somelimes grace and beauty. Loomis called his cat Bandit, because--black and white-it had a mask like a stagecoach robber or a raccoon. "Hi. pussy," he said. He put the three pieces of bread on the floor. Bandit first licked the margarine off the bread and then, with feline niceness. ate the crusts, took a drink of water out of the toilet, finished the soft part and climbed onto Loomis' lap. Its claws cut through the fatigues like the thorns of a rose. "Good Bandit, good Bandit. You know what, Bandit? My wife, my only wife came to see me today and I don't know what in hell to think about I he visit. I remember mostly watching her walk away from the place. Shit. Bandit. I love her." He worked behind the cat's ears with his thumb and third finger. Bandit purred loudly and shut its eyes. He had never figured out the cat's sex. He was reminded of the chicanos in the visiting room. "It's a good thing you don't turn me on, Bandit. I used to have an awful time with my member. Once I climbed this mountain in the Abruzzi. Six thousand feet. The woods were supposed to be full of bears. That's why I climbed the mountain. To see the bears. There was a refuge on the top of the mountain and I got there just before dark. I went in and built a fire and ate the sandwiches I'd brought and drank some wine and got into my sleeping bag and looked around for sleep, but my goddamned member was not in the mood for sleep at all. It was throbbing and asking where the action was, why we'd climbed this mountain with no rewards, what was my purpose, and so forth. Then someone, some animal, started scratching at the door. It must have been a wolf or a bear. Excepting for me, there wasn't anything else on the mountain. So then I said to my member. If that's a female wolf or a female bear, perhaps I can fix you up.' This made it thoughtful, for once--pensive--and I got to sleep, but--"

Then the general alarm rang. Loomis had never heard it before and didn't know what it was called, but it was a racket, obviously meant to announce fires, riots, the climax and the end of things, but it rang on and on, long after its usefulness as an announcement, a warning, an alert, an alarm, it sounded like some approach to craziness, it was out of control, it was in control, in possession, and then someone pulled a switch and there was that brief, brief sweetness that comes with the cessation of pain. Most of the cats had hidden and the wiser ones had taken off. Bandit was behind the toilet. Then the metal door rolled open and a bunch of guards came in, lead by Tiny. They wore the yellow waterproofs they wore for fire drill and they all carried clubs.

"Any of you got cats in your cells, throw them out," said Tiny. Two cats, at the end of the block, thinking, perhaps, that Tiny had food, went toward him. One was big, one was little. Tiny raised his club, way in the air, and caught a cat on the completion of the falling arc, tearing it in two. At the same time, another guard bashed in the head of the big cat. Blood, brains and offal splattered their yellow waterproofs and the sight of carnage reverberated through Loomis' dentalwork; caps, inlays, restorations, they all began to ache. He snapped his head around to see that Bandit had started for the closed door. He was pleased at this show of intelligence and by the fact that Bandit had spared him the confrontation that was going on between Tiny and Chicken Number Three. "Throw that cat out," said Tiny to Chicken.

"You ain't going to kill my pussy," said Chicken.

"You want six days cell lock," said Tiny.

"You ain't going to kill my pussy," said Chicken.

"Eight days cell lock," said Tiny. Chicken said nothing. He was hanging on to the cat. "You want the hole," said Tiny. "You want a month in the hole."

"I'll come back and get it later," said one of the other men.

It was half and half. Half the cats cased the slaughter and made for the closed door. Half of them wandered around at a loss, sniffing the blood of their kind and sometimes drinking it. Two of the guards vomited and half a dozen cats got killed eating the vomit. The cats that hung around the door, waiting to be let out, were easy targets. When a third guard got sick, Tiny said, "OK, OK, that's enough for tonight, but it don't give me back my London broil. Get the fire detail to clean this up." He signaled for the door to open and when it rolled back, six or maybe ten cats escaped, giving to Loomis some reminder of the invincible.

The fire detail came in with waste cans, shovels and two lengths of hose. They sluiced down the block and shoveled up the dead cats. They sluiced down the cells as well and Loomis climbed onto his bunk, knelt there and said: "'Blessed are the meek,'" but he couldn't remember what came next. " 'For theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven'?"