Falconer Read Online Free PDF Page A

tenanted. Most of the toilets and locks on the upper tier were broken andthese were empty. Nothing but the cell locks really worked and the toilet in Farragut’s cell flushed itself noisily and independently. The air of obsolescence—the feeling that these must surely be the last days of incarceration—was strong. Of the twenty men in F, Farragut, at the end of two weeks, fell into a family group that consisted of Chicken Number Two, Bumpo, the Stone, the Cuckold, Ransome and Tennis. This organization was deeply mysterious. Ransome was a very tall and a handsome man who was supposed to have murdered his father. Farragut had quickly learned never to ask a comrade what he was doing in Falconer. It would be a stupid violation of the terms on which they lived with one another, and in any case the truth was not in them. Ransome was laconic. He spoke to almost no one but the Stone, who was helpless. Everyone talked about the Stone. Some criminal organization had pierced his eardrums with an ice pick. They had then framed him, bought him a long sentence and given him a two-hundred-dollar hearing machine. This was a canvas carrier that hung from his shoulders by straps. It contained a plastic flesh-colored receiver, a pipe to his right ear and four batteries. Ransome guided the Stone to and from mess, urged him to wear his hearing appliance and changed his batteries when they faded. He almost never spoke to anyone else.
    Tennis had come on hard on Farragut’s second day, early in the morning when they had swept their cells and were waiting for chow. “I’m Lloyd Haversham, Jr.,” he said. “Does that name ring a bell? No? They call me Tennis. I thought you might know because you look like the sort of man who might play tennis. I won theSpartanburg doubles, twice in a row. I’m the second man in the history of tennis to have done this. I learned on private courts, of course, I’ve never played on a public court. I’m listed in the sports encyclopedia, the dictionary of sports greats, I’m a member of the tennis academy and I was cover story in the March issue of
Racquets. Racquets
is the leading publication of the tennis equipment industry.” While he talked, Tennis displayed all the physical business of a hard sell—hands, shoulders, pelvis, everything was in motion. “I’m in here because of a clerical error, an error in banking. I’m a visitor, a transient, I see the parole board in a few days and I’ll be out then. I deposited thirteen thousand dollars in the Bank for Mutual Savings on the morning of the ninth and wrote three checks for two hundred dollars before the deposit had cleared. By accident I used my roommate’s checkbook—he was runner-up in the Spartanburg doubles and never forgave me for my victory. All a man needs is a little jealousy and a clerical error—bad luck—and they throw him into jail, but I’ll leap the net in a week or two. This is more of a goodbye than a hello but hello anyhow!” Tennis, like most of them, talked in his sleep and Farragut had heard him asking: “Have you been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?” Bumpo explained this to Farragut. Tennis’s athletic career was thirty years in the past and he had been picked up for check forgery when he was working as a delicatessen clerk. Bumpo had this to say about Tennis, but he said nothing about himself, although he was the cellblock celebrity and was supposed to have been the second man to hijack an airplane. He had forced a pilot to flyfrom Minneapolis to Cuba and was in on an eighteen-year sentence for kidnapping. Bumpo never mentioned this or anything else about himself excepting a large ring he wore, set with a diamond or a piece of glass. “It’s worth twenty thousand,” he said. The price varied from day to day. “I’d sell it, I’d sell it tomorrow if somebody’d guarantee me it would save a life. I mean if there was some very old and lonely and hungry person whose life I could save, well, then I’d