Falconer

Farragut was still limping, but his hair had begun to grow back, when he was asked to cut a ditto sheet for an a

This was in the autumn, and mixed with the Fiduciary University a

Above the leaves and the fliers and the walls were the birds. Farragut was a little wary about the birds since the legend of cruelly confined men loving the birds of the air had never moved him. He tried to bring a practical and informed tone to his interest in birds, but he had very little information. He became interested in a flock of red-winged blackbirds. They lived in swamps, he knew, so there must have been a swamp near Falconer. They fed at dusk in some stagnant water other than the swamp where they lived. Night after night, all through the summer and deep into the fall, Farragut stood at his window and watched the black birds crass the blue sky above the walls. There would be one or two in the begi

Only five men in cellblock F applied for the course in banking. Nobody much took it seriously. They guessed that the Fiduciary University was either newborn or on the skids and had resorted to Falconer for publicity. The bounteous education of unfortunate convicts was always good for some space in the paper. When the time came, Farragut and the others went down to the parole board room to take the intelligence quotient test. Farragut knew that he tested badly. He had never tested over 119 and had once gone as low as 101. In the army this had kept him from any position of command and had saved his life. He took the test with twenty-four other men, counting blocks and racking his memory for the hypotenuse of the isosceles triangle. The scores were supposed to be secret, but for a package of cigarettes Tiny told him he had flunked out with 112. Jody scored at 140 and claimed he had never done so badly.

Jody was Farragut’s best friend. They had met in the shower, where Farragut had noticed a slight young man with black hair smiling at him. He wore around his neck a simple and elegant gold cross. They were not allowed to speak in the shower, but the stranger, soaping his left shoulder, spread out his palm so that Farragut could read there, written in indelible ink; "Meet me later." When they had dressed they met at the door. "You the professor?" the stranger asked. "I'm 734-508-32," said Farragut. He was that green. "Well, I'm Jody," said the stranger brightly, "and I know you're Farragut but so long as you ain't homosexual I don't care what your name is. Come on with me. I'll show you my hideout." Farragut followed him across the grounds to an abandoned water tower. They climbed up a rusty ladder to a wooden catwalk where there was a mattress, a butt can and some old magazines. "Everybody's got to have a hideout," said Jody. "This is mine. The view is what they call the Millionaire's View. Next to the death house, this is the best place for seeing it." Farragut saw, over the roofs of the old cellblocks and the walls, a two-mile stretch of river with cliffs and mountains on the western shore. He had seen or glimpsed the view before at the foot of the prison street, but this was the most commanding sight he had been given of the world beyond the wall and he was deeply moved.

"Sit down, sit down," his friend said, "sit down and I'll tell you about my past. I ain't like most of the dudes, who won't tell you nothing. Everybody knows that Freddy, the Mad Dog Killer, iced six men, but you ask him, he'll tell you he's in for stealing flowers from some park. He ain't kidding. He means it. He really believes it. But when I have a buddy I tell him everything if he wants to hear it. I talk a lot, but I listen a lot too. I'm a very good listener. But my past is really my past. I don't have no future at all. I don't see the parole board for twelve years. What I do around here don't matter much, but I like to stay out of the hole. I know there ain't no medical evidence for brain damage, but after you hit yourself about fourteen times you get silly. Once I banged myself seven times. There wasn't nothing more to come out, but I went on banging myself. I couldn't stop. I was going crazy. That ain't healthy. Anyhow, I was indicted on fifty-three counts. I had a forty-five-thousand-dollar house in Leavittown, a great wife and two great sons: Michael and Dale. But I was in this bind. People with your kind of life style don't ever understand. I didn't graduate from high school, but I was up for an office in the mortgage department of Hamilton Trust. But nothing was moving. Of course, my not having an education was a drawback and they were laying people off, left and right. I just couldn't make enough money to support four people and when I put the house up for sale I discover that every fucking house on the block is on the market. I thought about money all the time. I dreamed about money. I was picking dimes, nickels and pe