Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 109
It was an August day; a dog day. Rome and Paris would be empty
of everyone but tourists, and even the Pope would be taking it easy
in Gandolfo. After the methadone line, Farragut went out to cut
the big lawn between the education building and cellblock A. He
got the mower and the gas tank out of the garage and joked with
the Mad Dog Killer. He started the motor with a rope pull, which
brought on memories of outboard motors on mountain lakes in
the long ago. That was the summer when he had learned to waterski,
not at the stern of an outboard, but at the stern of a racer
called a Gar-Wood. He had Christianiaed over the high starboard
wake—bang—onto a riffled and corrugated stretch of water and
then into the dropped curtain of a rain squall. “I have my
memories,” he said to the lawn mower. “You can’t take my
memories away from me.” One night he and a man named Tony
and two girls and a bottle of Scotch raced eight miles down the
lake at full throttle—you couldn’t have heard thunder—to the
excursion boat pier, where there was a big clock face under a sign
that said: THE NEXT EXCURSION TO THE NARROWS WILL BE
AT…They had come to steal the big clock face. It would look great
in somebody’s bedroom along with the YIELD sign and the DEER
CROSSING treasure. Tony was at the helm and Farragut was the
appointed thief. He vaulted the gunwale and began to pull at the
clock face, but it was securely nailed to the pier. Tony passed
Farragut a wrench from the toolbox and he smashed the supports
with this, but the noise woke some old watchman, who limped
after him while he carried the clock face to the Gar-Wood. “Oh,