Falconer Read Online Free PDF Page B

if he could continue the questioning at home and so she scored with him. So then that night, that very night, an old high school chum showed up and she scored, wet-decks, with him. Then the next morning, the very next morning, when she was getting gas at Harry’s she got the hots for this new gas pumper and he comes over to the house on his lunch hour. So at about that time I got back into my pants and went out of the house and down to the bar on the corner and stayed there for about two hours but at the end of two hours I was back in bed with her.” “You were going to give me a piece of ham,” said Farragut. “Oh, yes,” said the Cuckold. Hewas both stingy and greedy, and Farragut got only a thin, small slice of ham. Chicken bargained with the Cuckold and wouldn’t go into his cell until he had been promised a set quantity of food.
    Farragut queued up for supper between Bumpo and Tennis that night. They had rice, franks, bread, oleomargarine and half a canned peach. He palmed three slices of bread for his cat and jogged up to cellblock 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. Farragut 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 leach 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 half-man, the sort of person you wouldn’t have spoken to at school or college, the victim of a bad barber, tailor and makeup artist, exclaim: “We present with pleasure to Mrs. Charles Alcorn, of 11,235 275th Boulevard, the four-door cathedral-size refrigerator containing two hundred 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 other 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 Farragut 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-1’s, fucking ’03’s to simulate fucking carbines, fucking obsolete BAR’s and fucking sixty-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 Farragut the dim force of a recollection. “Fucking”meant M-1’s,